Bullhead is a 2011 film from Belgium directed by Michael R. Rosskam.
Jacky is a cattle farmer in the Flemish region of Belgium. He is mixed up with some bad people, namely, some gangsters who are into smuggling both illegal steroids and illegal meat. Specifically, the gangsters give illegal steroids to Jacky, Jacky and his family shoot up their cows with 'roads which make them bigger, and Jacky smuggles the meat out to his gangster partners. Besides giving steroids to his cows, Jacky also uses them himself, and they have made him a scary muscle-bound hulk prone to violent rages.
Meanwhile, the steroid-smuggling gangsters wind up murdering a cop. Jacky and his family weren't involved in the murder, but Jacky's brother Stieve bought the distinctive tires that originally came off the killers' getaway car. The police have an informant, Diederick, among the steroid smugglers, and they are pressuring him to get them more information. Diederick and the smugglers have a meeting with Jacky and his brother, and Diederick is startled to recognize Jacky's name. It turns out that twenty years ago they were childhood buddies. Diederick knows why Jacky takes steroids: not because he wants to be jacked, but as a result of a terrifying injury.
Tropes:
- Bait-and-Switch: Diederick is walking along when a woman pulls up alongside him in a car, rolls down her window, and tells him to "Come to the hotel for a fuck!". Does he have an aggressively horny girlfriend? No, the lady with the foul mouth is actually a police detective, and Diederick is her informant, and the whole routine about going to a hotel for sex is a ruse to deflect suspicion.
- Blood from the Mouth: A boy's testicles aren't connected to his respiratory system, but young Jacky is shown coughing up Blood from the Mouth to demonstrate the gravity of the injury Bruno is inflicting on him.
- Downer Ending: Jacky does not find happiness with Lucia. Instead, he commits Suicide by Cop.
- Drugs Are Bad: Not coke or heroin as usual, but steroids, which have left Jacky unnaturally muscle-bound and also prone to eruptions of rage.
- Dutch Angle: A radical one as the camera shots eventually tilt to a full 90 degrees from vertical, in the sad scene near the end where a handcuffed Jacky is being taken out of Lucia's apartment after he's arrested.
- Establishing Character Moment: In the first scene Jacky stalks up to a distant relative of his and starts breathing fire and murder, screaming at the man for refusing to sell cattle to the meat smugglers. Jacky is established as a terrifying brutish hulk, although the film later reveals that there's much more to his character.
- Flashback: A lengthy flashback sequence establishes why Jacky takes steroids. When he was a child of ten or so, he was brutally assaulted by an older boy, who castrated him by crushing his testicles with a rock. Jacky started taking 'roids as a boy because otherwise he would never go through the secondary stages of puberty, but he's gotten hooked on them, and is now unnaturally bulked up.
- Groin Attack: A horrifying scene in which Bruno chases down young Jacky, pins him to the ground, and castrates him by smashing his testicles with a hammer.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Richter has no hesitation about discussing the murder of the cop in front of the French-speaking mechanics, because, as Richter tells his partner, "Those Walloons don't understand a fucking thing we say."
- The Informant: Diederick is an informant for the Belgian police, giving them intel on the smuggling ring. He faces a crisis of conscience when he sees Jacky, because he still feels guilty over what happened to Jacky 20 years ago.
- Invulnerable Knuckles: A plot point. Jacky savagely beat the man who chatted up Lucia at the nightclub, and badly cut up his own knuckles in the process. When Lucia sees Jacky's scabbed-over bloody knuckles, she knows that Jacky is the man who beat up her friend.
- Kubrick Stare: How Bruno the teenaged goon looks at Jacky and Diederick when he sees the two of them eyeballing his sister Lucia. This sets up Bruno's violent assault on Jacky moments later.
- Precision F-Strike: Evidently English curse words are more fun that Flemish ones, because Eva goes "Oh fuck!" when she finds out that her informant, Diederick, is going to meet with the Walloon mechanics who are about to be arrested.
- Shower of Angst: Rather, a Bath of Angst, as Jacky starts running a bath, then curls up into a fetal position in the tub and cries. He has just met Bruno, the boy who assaulted and maimed him 20 years ago. (Whatever was wrong with Bruno 20 years ago has gotten a lot worse, and has left him unable to walk or talk.)
- Suicide by Cop: Apparently what Jacky does at the end. He ingests a lot of steroids, far more than anyone might take at a single time, after finding out that the police are on their way. Then, as he's being taken down in an elevator, he deliberately assaults them, even though his hands are cuffed behind his back. One of the cops, pinned to the wall of the elevator with Jacky's foot on his neck, shoots him.
- There Are No Coincidences: When Diederick tries to dismiss the business with Stieve and the tires, saying that it's just a coincidence, Eva the cop says "There's no such thing as coincidence! Coincidence is for losers!".
- Title Drop: One of the Walloon mechanics says that Jacky has "a head like a bull!", which leads to a cop referring to Jacky as "Bullhead" when the cops are preparing for a raid on the cattle farm.
