In an interview with Humo, when Henderickx was asked what S. was about, he answered: ‘About young people who get lost. About a hurt girl looking for happiness. And about the confrontations with weirdos, riff-raff and dumbos she encounters on her way to happiness.’ S. is the name of the protagonist, played by the phenomenal debutant actress Natali Broods. The film is a hard, sexually charged generation-X film, that doesn’t let any taboo escape our attention.S. is an erratic, traumatised young woman who has nothing to hold onto in life. Her mother is a whore, her father was executed for murder. Her own relationships are a mess: violent and loveless. We regularly see her driving round in a stifling Brussels or New York to the sound of dEUS classics, sick of herself and of the world. It is a hallucinogenic trip through harsh reality, that in S. is shown as one big peepshow, right down to the falling shutters on the cubicles. To get just a little happiness for herself, S. goes over (men’s) dead bodies.S. is an indictment of the insensitivity and apathetic fascination that remained after the first shock about the child murders and paedophilia affairs in Belgium. Henderickx forcefully opposes the fact that Belgium is still trying to make itself look like a nice and friendly country to itself.
