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Dexter's orderly life is disturbed when a girl appears at his work who looks strikingly like his girlfriend Stella. His life becomes increasingly disrupted: he is driven from his regular place of work, Stella ends their relationship and his boss sends him on leave with immediate effect. When Dexter has rammed several cars, he's arrested by the police and taken to hospital. There it become clear what is wrong with him. Despite - or possibly thanks to - his handicap, he gets to know a different side of himself that finally makes it possible for him to contact his own world of feelings.
The inspiration for Froukje Tan was Oliver Sacks' famous book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in which he writes about his patients who have an unusual 'dropout' in their brain. Tan wanted to tell the story of a man with an unusual angle on life: ‘I didn't want to make a realistic film about a handicap, and about how someone has to maintain themselves in a world that has become incomprehensible to them. Precisely because no one can see, apart from the person suffering, what it's like to live in a distorted world, this gave me the freedom to create my own reality. For me, the film is about the way in which we perceive reality and how subjective that is.' Left is a refined, restrained tragicomedy in which reality is tilted slightly, but never completely. (JJ)