Undergrowth
2023 · 16m · Netherlands
Directed by Tim Ewalts
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, darkly comic
Two brothers and their father live secluded in a forest; while their father tries to teach them how to become a lumberjack, the brothers are stuck in an escalating struggle for power.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A coming-of-age film about brothers and lumberjacks should be dead on arrival, but Ewalts leans into the absurdity of masculine ritual in the woods hard enough that it actually works—the power struggle feels genuinely weird instead of predictable.
Ewalts positions himself within a lineage of Scandinavian forestry cinema and American masculinity studies, and the formal restraint—letting the brothers' competition breathe through long shots rather than cutting into hysteria—shows real directorial consideration.
The film hinges entirely on how Ewalts frames the brothers' bodies relative to the forest and their father; that single compositional choice—keeping them small against the trees while they wage their private war—is what separates this from every other teenage-rebellion story.