"Why can't we just have different opinions and be nice about it?"
You called the wrong fucking whore a fucking whore.
— Femke Boot
The Columnist (De Kuthoer) is a Dutch Horror Comedy film directed by Ivo van Aart and starring Katja Herbers. It was released in the Netherlands in 2019, and debuted in international film festivals a year later.
Femke Boot is an outspoken author and columnist with a very big problem: she has become the target of online harassment, as countless anonymous voices taunt, slander, and threaten her. When she discovers that one of her violent detractors is actually a neighbor, she snaps and embarks on a personal quest for bloody vengeance against every troll who crosses her.
Tropes
- Animal Motifs: Spiders, which are seen often throughout the film, usually before Femke inundates herself with more harassment or before killing someone.
- Bolivian Army Ending: Femke shows up to her book launch party covered in blood. Whether or not she'll be caught is left up in the air; on one hand, the people at the party think the blood is fake and applaud it as an artistic statement, but on the other, Anna is still alive and knows that her mother is a killer.
- Creepy Souvenir: Femke collects the middle fingers of her victims and keeps them stored in a box of peas hidden in her freezer. This is how Anna and Steven find out she's a serial killer.
- Fingore: How Femke collects her trophies.
- Electrified Bathtub: One of Femke's trolls meets his end when she throws his laptop into his bathtub.
- Hypocrite: Femke taught her daughter Anna to cherish the value of a free press, while she herself is murdering her critics. Best illustrated when Anna presents a speech to her class on the subject that her mother wrote, while Femke is off killing an elderly couple who sent her messages she didn't like.
- Internet Jerk: Femke is inundated with abuse from these. Turns out they're not nearly as anonymous as they think they are.
- Mistaken for Pedophile: A lot of the harassment directed at Femke concerns an old article of hers taken out of context that led some people to believe that she was a pedophile.
- Murder by Mistake: When Femke tracks down her most persistent and elusive troll and goes after him, she accidentally gets his father first.
- Police Are Useless: The police fundamentally cannot wrap their heads around how online harassment is a problem, and blow off Femke's concerns when she goes to them for help.
- Serial Killer: Over the course of the film, Femke becomes a serial murderer targeting people who harass her online.
- Social Media Is Bad: Enough to push Femke over the edge. She can't disengage with it, either; her job requires her to have an online presence. Later, she turns it around on her victims by using their social media profiles to figure out where they live, with enough of them leaving unwitting clues as to their real identities and home addresses that she can find them.
- Spiritual Antithesis: To Falling Down, another satire about an ordinary person who hits their Rage Breaking Point and goes on a vigilante rampage against what they see as a World Gone Mad, specifically where their respective Villain Protagonists and politics are concerned. Falling Down's William Foster is an Angry White Man with a blue-collar engineering background who targets what he sees as the lowlifes tearing society apart, most of them drawn from the fears of conservative Middle America in the early '90s, from an Asian Store-Owner to Gangbangers to a homeless Phony Veteran to a country-club fat cat. This film's Femke, meanwhile, is a outspoken liberal woman who writes for a newspaper, and the lowlifes she goes after, mostly internet trolls and conspiracy theorists, are drawn from the fears of young, educated liberals in the late 2010s.
- White Shirt of Death: As pictured on the poster. Femke wears that outfit during the ending after killing Tariq, his father, and Steven.
