Meat Kills (Vleesdag) UK première at FrightFest, 30th August 2026
Meat Kills (Vleesdag, literally ‘Meat Day’) opens with a creepy point-of-view shot through the dark corridors of a slaughterhouse.
This is not the perspective of an animal on its last journey, but of ‘inside girl’ Mirthe (Caro Derkx, her forename the Latin word for ‘meat’), who has got herself a job at Heerema’s Piggery in order secretly to film the illegal mistreatment of livestock there. When she is caught and tries to flee, she is roughly tackled to the muddy ground – like an animal – by the older son Jacco (Derron Lurvink), and then summarily fired and threatened by the father Jonas (Bart Oomen), who breaks her phone in front of her. All things considered, Mirthe could have got off much worse, except that both parties here are compromised.
If the Piggery is cutting corners and “violating EU welfare regulations”, Mirthe too is breaking rules, given that phones are strictly and expressly forbidden on the work floor – and the younger son Jonathan (Sweder de Sitter), an old schoolfriend of Mirthe’s, is right to feel deceived and betrayed by the woman whom he loves and whom he trusted to come work at his family’s business. This clan knows the struggles to keep its operation afloat, and also knows tragedy. For only recently, the materfamilias succumbed to illness and died, while the much younger daughter Jerrienne (Juliëtte van de Weerdt) – yes, curiously all the members of this family have forenames beginning with the letter ‘J’ – is herself ailing upstairs on a cocktail of medication. Amid all the mud and the blood here, there is also grief, tension and dysfunction. This family is near breaking point, and has enough internal pressures already for any sabotage coming from outsiders to be the last straw.
With the hidden footage as her passport, Mirthe runs into the arms of another closed, dysfunctional clan – the ‘Animal Army’, a group of young radical vegetarians who take clandestine actions against farms like Heerema’s Piggery. When Mirthe dons a pig mask and joins the group’s leader Nasha (Emma Josten) and members Ishmael (Sem Ben Yakar), Donna (Chardonnay Rillen) and Humphrey (Tommy Zonnerveld) on a raid to liberate the farm’s livestock, she soon finds herself in the middle of a tense, rapidly escalating confrontation between two irreconcilable parties whose humanity fast becomes a casualty to bestiality and butchery.
Once things get moving – and that does not at all take long – Meat Kills, directed by Martijn Smits and written by Paul de Vrijer, is a brutal, bludgeoning affair, evoking all at once Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), Baptiste Rouveure’s Anonymous Animals (Les Animaux Anonymes, 2020) and Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell’s Wake Up (2023). It also captures that feeling – familiar to anyone who has ever got caught up online in any argument about a tinderbox controversy (animal ethics, trans rights, the Palestinian cause, whatever) where positions have long since become entrenched, where divisions have widened to the point that compromise is impossible, and where there can be no longer be any middle ground – that if one side does not destroy you, the other will. For naïve, non-violent Mirthe finds herself trapped between extremes – between a butcher’s block and a carving knife – and her every appeal to reasonableness or nuance only encourages more outrage. The ensuing atrocities are Orwellian, with everyone, even after the masks have come off, looking like a pig and destined for the slaughter.
strap: Martijn Smits’ animal-rights apocalypse pits irreconcilable extremes against each other, resulting in bleakly bloody and bludgeoning butchery
© Anton Bitel
