The Treatment (2024)

The Treatment

Hans Herbots’s The Treatment is a procedural thriller that puts pedophilia at the center, and it’s as unpleasantly close to being exploitative as a mystery can get. It doesn’t settle for imagining one serial rapist’s crimes, but posits a “pedophile network” through which he operates; it then hands the case off to a haunted detective whose own brother disappeared in childhood, probably another victim of similar acts.

Though not gory or particularly explicit, the Belgian film is unsparing in its depiction of crime scenes and evidence; some viewers will find this too much, while others may be drawn to it as an import thanks to its intricacies and red herrings (all of which remain baffling until almost the end).

Geert Van Rampelberg plays Nick Cafmeyer, who many years after losing his brother no body was ever found continues to be taunted by the aging neighbor who was long a suspect but never charged. Unworried that this lawman will turn vigilante on him, Ivan Plettinckx (Johan van Assche) sneaks around Nick’s house at night, leaving him notes that give different accounts of what he did to the boy.

So when his most recent investigation involves a murdered child who was repeatedly raped over days while his parents were chained up nearby signs suggest this will happen again if they don’t catch the killer soon Nick takes it rather personally. But motives indicated by markings at the scene are even stranger than simple pedophilia.

While following leads with fellow cops (and semi-officially on his own), Nick introduces us to some very creepy characters: potential perpetrators or their protectors or simply unlucky hermits. Neither Herbots nor screenwriter Carl Joos are kind about mental illness or trauma hereabouts, playing up clichés involving sweaty shut-ins unable to speak for themselves; our hero is likewise quick to assume things.

But Van Rampelberg’s fierce, committed performance carries us through the character’s wrong turns, while parallel scenes show the rapist’s latest scheme advancing toward its sickening climax. The truth is more terrible than any of the detectives guess, and The Treatment doesn’t make it easy to hear.

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