In Wim Vink’s Heaven is Only in Hell, you literally watch people eat cheese and drink wine at a very civilized dinner party.
In Wim Vink’s Half Past Midnight, you literally watch people eat entreés and drink wine at a very civilized restaurant.
Coincidence? I think not!
Vink is the master of the mundane. He takes time to notice things, from dripping faucets to bowls of fruit, and he really wants you to understand that life isn’t just about the cocaine bender highs and the soul-wrenching lows. No, life’s really about the long, eventless spaces in between, the times where we wait for a delayed bus or take a midterm or stare listlessly at a clock. Sometimes Vink’s focus on the humdrum leads to eye-gouging boredom, as in Heaven is Only in Hell. But sometimes it leads to a goopy slasher where a chainsaw rips through a torso.
What time is it? It’s Half Past Midnight.
Debbie is having a rough time at school. She’s getting bullied relentlessly by the popular bitches—you know the ones with the big perms and the dramatic eye makeup. There’s absolutely no reason why everyone hates Debbie so much. She seems like a decent young lady— studious, quiet, sweet to her loving parents. She likes to noodle with circuit boards and pay attention in class. Still, she’s the target. Classmates push her off her chair, break her camera, fuck up her bicycle, and kill her.
Luckily a nurse injects her in the eyeball with poison and Debbie gets reanimated. So she does what every nerd does: she solders circuits and creates a fanny pack power source for her chainsaw. Then she gets busy. This is the best use of a fanny pack I’ve ever seen on film.
Half Past Midnight is a splattery slasher crammed into 32 short but epic minutes. The first 25 minutes are the mundane details we’ve come to expect from Vink. Debbie eats breakfast, she reads, and she goes on a date with her teacher, which is definitely not appropriate but maybe things are different in the Netherlands. The final seven minutes of the film are what the people call a good time. Legs are sawn off and torsos are ripped apart. It’s a rainbath of blood and guts and mayhem.
At its heart, the film has all the highs of a slasher—a fractured killer, surprise murders, disemboweled victims—but they’re strung together with quotidien tasks and slack-jawed faces. There’s also very little dialogue, so the actors emote with their wooden expressions and not with their voices. There are smirks, lascivious smiles, and vengeful scowls, and there’s also blank stares and mildly confused looks. All of this is what gives Half Past Midnight a fantastic, surreal sheen. If that wasn’t reason enough to watch, the soundtrack is nothing short of incredible: simple, minimal synth pop that sounds like a cheaper version of Depeche Mode. It’s exactly the kind of music two bros in Brooklyn would want to make, but somehow can’t. Similarly, Half Past Midnight is so simple in concept, anyone could make it, but somehow can’t. Except, of course, Wim Vink.
