Pendance pairs Ben Brand’s Find This Dumb Little Bitch and Throw Her Into a River with a short. Ali Asgari’s Delay is about a man (Mohammad Kamal Alavi) in an airport with his two children. There, he finds an older man (Babak Karimi) possibly engaging in sexual misconduct on his pre-pubescent daughter. I wouldn’t mind seeing an expanded version of this.
What we got instead is Ben Brand’s movie. It made its first mistake by shifting its focus away from the titular ‘bitch,’ Lizzy (Senna Fokke). Instead, the film is about her brother Remco (Nino den Brave), the boy inadvertently responsible for making their crimes viral. He videotapes Lizzy throwing puppies down the river, a fictional version of a viral video eight years ago.
There aren’t a lot of details about the real girl who did this, other than that she’s free. So Brand and his co-writer Ilse Ott tried to create a world where two teenagers wouldn’t think that throwing puppies down a river or posting a video of that on YouTube would not be the wisest thing to do.
One realistic aspect of this story is how Remco’s content goes stagnant online, despite his attempts to post it on Reddit. People eventually catch on to his dirty work, leading a bunch of online sleuths to find out who she is in English instead of Dutch. To that I ask why aren’t the police or PETA on to this?
Instead what we get is both the Internet and the real world as a lawless place. Animal cruelty viral videos have been around for a decade now, if not longer. It took too long for the fallout of Lizzy and Remco’s actions to take place. And the lack of nuanced or appropriate responses to what Lizzy did suspends disbelief.
