Wonderful character development!

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

I had to read some of the more in-depth reviews to understand what I had been watching here, because clearly, I didn't although I'm usually very open to abstraction. In short, this movie is about a home invasion by a hobo and his team, who turn out to be very organized criminals on a murder spree. The whole story is spiked with bizarre dialogs and actions by both the invaders and the invaded. On the plus side, the movie managed to keep my attention until the end. On the minus side, the more it went on, the more the need grew for a big explanation of what was going on and that's where the movie let me down in the end. It just leaves the spectator to interpret for himself. Yes, thank to another review, I now know that the hobo is a demon and that he and his team are collecting souls and twisting the minds of their victims, but my gripe is that this message is so well concealed in a puzzle of symbolic hints that it will remain a mystery to the majority of viewers and that's what I call a pretentious piece of art. It's good to make people think, but it's bad to expose people as idiots by exposing them to a riddle they won't solve for lack of hints and yes, there are many of these hints but they just fail to create an image that could help the viewer solve the puzzle. Add a lot of very gratuitous brutality and you have a movie that comes across like someone wanted to make a version of Funny Games in the style of Lars von Trier. Watch only if you have a special interest in artsy, post Dogma-style movies or a hang to bizarre sadism paired with masochism. That movie made me angry.

Life does not forgive mistakes and some things look like inevitable. This is brilliant story, symbolic as it can be, which may not be easy to understand and maybe a bit daunting but it will keep you interested in the plot till the very end and the messages it brings are numerous and life saving: *the symbol of opening the door to a stranger and not being able to set boundaries, feeling guilty that we owe something to a stranger that never stops and turns into unexpected set of events. *we all are recognized by our deeds, not by one off events, the father who feeds 3 children, or poor guy who begs for shelter, and asks every day more, and never gives, only asks further....and the best ever message of the film is the energy of being close to negativity, or evil may destroy us no matter how smart we are, if we don't flock together, those who are better organized, smarter will win over, its the inevitability of life laws. no mistake is being forgiven, being naive is certainly one of them.In the end it makes you think if life really is simplistic black and white picture, if you believe in the God as the truth, and Evil as the ultimate lie then it is so. And humans are all this in between those extremes.

One of the most meaningless movies I have ever seen in my life! Lots of people who are not talented at all in any 'art field', lets say, would admire, and say 'wow, what a great movie' just because they don't understand it, where the truth is this movie is simply waste of time.. Good movie is the one which makes you think or feel something; giving you a perspective of how would one feel in another man's shoes; giving an option of being a judge or a victim, and all that as a plane thought experiment. This movie fail to do any of these things. Conversations are completely disconnected, shallow and there is no point in it at all. Strange doesn't mean remarkable, it means something that has been said or done differently apart from socially acceptable rules, but still with some sense and hidden meaning which makes you think and ask questions you didn't ask before. This movie is not strange whatsoever but it feels like somebody had a great idea but didn't really know how to communicate it and end it.

Who equates horror with the Netherlands? Windmills, tulips, cocoa, and Hans Brinker all come to mind but none of these things are cause for alarm. Director Alex van Warmerdam evidently wants to change your mind about Dutch stereotypes with "Borgman".This is one strange film. Who, or more importantly, what is Borgman? In the opening scenes, we follow a group of locals including a gun- toting priest, roust Borgman from his underground home in a forest. No explanation is given about why a mob is after this person, yet the inclusion of the priest hints that Mr. B. might be something other than human. Mr. B. alerts a few other underground dwellers that the jig is up and runs away. Mr. B. wanders onto the property of an evidently well-to-do couple in a boxlike house, asks to take a bath and when turned away by the man of the house, Mr. B. insinuates he "knows" the wife. A beating commences and Mr. B finally gets the attention of the wife who is feeling guilty over her husband's violence. So far, so good. Borgman worms his way into the lives of the family he's "adopted", aided and abetted by the wife who appears to be drawn to this dirty homeless man. The wife keeps her new friend out of the sight of her husband and bad things happen. About halfway through this unsettling story, all the tension and suspense is allowed to spiral out into surreal episodes that eventually become numbing. Borgman has friends. We don't know who or what they are. Two women might be able to become dogs. The family's gardener and his wife are destroyed in the film's most unpleasant scene, allowing Borgman to take the gardener's place. Shorn of his beard, he goes unrecognized. Scant reason for everything that happens during the second half of the film is where the story fails. It becomes boring. Since we cannot penetrate the motivations of the lead character or his allies, it's difficult to care what happens to whom. The director tightens the noose for an hour and then it all goes slack.The are some memorable visuals here, especially the bodies in the water. Many questions are asked of the viewer, but no resolution or answers are given to reward your attention. The ending is both abrupt and frustrating. One suspects that the director and screenplay refused to give any easy answers, leaving the viewer to either think this is one amazing metaphysical satire. Or maybe you just got your head messed with for two hours and ended up with a headache trying to figure out what wasn't there to begin with. Five stars for the performance of Jan Bijvoet as the title character and the aforementioned visuals. Now, about those dogs...