From its earliest images inside an online game world to its final sequences (parts of which take place only inside the hero’s mind), the Belgian-Dutch film “Ben X” is something of a head trip.
The head we are locked into belongs to Ben (Greg Timmermans), a teenager with Asperger’s Syndrome, the high-functioning form of autism.
Highly intelligent but socially bewildered, Ben has learned to mimic the behavior of others, even though he can’t comprehend concepts such as metaphor (the phrase “give me a hand” is completely puzzling).
At school, he’s bullied. At home, he disappears into the landscape of his favorite multiplayer computer game, where his heroic avatar conceals all his awkwardness.
Eventually, the woman who interacts with him in the game is going to want to meet him, a challenge far greater than his 3-D animated quest.
Thanks to viral videos of his classroom humiliation, Ben is subject to public abuse as well as small-scale tauntings, beatings, and the other tortures handed out to “different” students.
The film ladles this on so insistently that you might wonder whether anybody’s in charge at this school. Director Nicholas Balthazar doesn’t hold anything back, in repeated scenes of the two main bullies and their loathsome behavior.
The melodrama of this is heavy, but Balthazar has a cause. He also wrote the novel the film is based on, and was inspired by a true story of a 17-year-old autistic boy from Brussels who committed suicide after being bullied.
Periodically, Ben (and the movie) retreats into his computer world, where he lives out his Tolkienesque fantasy. Laura Verlinden plays the girl on the other side of his cyberspace connection.
Balthazar fills the movie with visual flash, which helps cover up how thin the material really is. Ben’s doctors, for instance, are broadly caricatured as a gallery of grotesques; I have no idea how this advances the movie’s ideas.
Unfortunately, by the time you get to the end of the picture, it feels like a simple idea stretched out to 93 minutes.
A spirited (and mostly nonspeaking) central performance by newcomer Timmermans goes a long way toward making it bearable for viewers over the age of 19.
“Ben X”
A teen with Asperger’s Syndrome is relentlessly bullied in school, but a hero in his online gaming universe — a situation that director Nicholas Balthazar stretches thin, despite the best efforts of newcomer Greg Timmermans in the (mostly nonspeaking) lead role. (In Dutch, with English subtitles.)
Rated: Not rated; probably R for subject matter.
Showing: SIFF Cinema.
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