The Treatment isn’t a film you’re likely to forget.
It might come together a little conveniently towards the end but for most of the running time director Hans Herbots keeps us on an unsure footing as to how this is going to turn out.
Nick Cafmeyer (Van Rampelberg) is a detective hunting the paedophile who invaded a couple’s home and who, after two days of torture, absconded with their young boy. But something is wrong: the distraught parents don’t want to talk about what happened and are reluctant to help Nick out. The father is especially hostile. It’s here that this gritty procedural thriller takes some unexpected steps: the audience becomes privy to more information than the under pressure detective as he casts about for possible suspects.
The swimming teacher (Michael Vergauwen) who touches the kids in his class is a suspect, as is the mentally unstable loner who keeps bottles of urine in his apartment. The children in the neighbourhood speak of ‘troll’ who can climb walls and trees, bringing a hint of the supernatural. And Nick himself taunted by Plettinckx (van Assche), an ageing paedophile whom Nick reckons is responsible for the disappearance of his younger brother twenty-five years ago.
The Treatment really taps into that sense of panic and rising dread that this isn’t going to end well. It moves quickly, flitting from clue to suspect to red herring, making us guess and guess again as to whom the paedophile might be. It becomes very difficult viewing very quickly. And then it gets worse. Herbots conjures up some disturbing imagery – Nick forces himself to watch uncovered child porn for clues – and in Nancy Lammers (Ingrid De Vos), writer Carl Joos, adapting Mo Hayder’s novel (a London-based thriller relocated to Belgium), has constructed a character that will haunt for some time. This is a film that pummels any vestige of hope and faith in humanity you may be clinging on to. Grim stuff.
But The Treatment doesn’t have it all its own way. In an attempt to tie the two stories together – this latest abduction and that of Nick’s younger brother years before – Herbots and co. get too cosy with convenience. It’s a stretch too to believe the abductor’s titular modus operandi.
Not for the faint hearted.
