The Netherlands’ Oscar® 2019 Entry for the Best International Feature ‘Instinct’
This artistic depiction of the dark side of female sexuality, depicted by first time director and renowned actress Halina Reijn, takes us inside of a seasoned, freelance psychologist who becomes completely infatuated by the sex offender she is treating in a penal institution.
Halina Reijn is a renowned director, actress, author and producer. She is the winner of multiple awards, including the Dutch film Award, the Golden Calf for Best Actress , the Dutch theater awards Theo D’Or and Colombina, as well as the Courbois Pearl, an award which honors an actress who has made an indelible impression, both on stage as in film and television. Since 2017 she is also the proud owner of the Theo Mann-Bouwmeester Ring, an award to honor an actress who has contributed greatly to the Dutch theatre.
Halina Reijn takes on her first directorial challenge without inhibition, fully aware of tackling sensitive issues which society does its best to avoid: what is it that pushes us towards the dark side of our desires, in spite of the danger that lies therein? What does it mean to “be a woman” in a society which prefers to domesticate rather than liberate? Halina Reijn raises these questions, alongside other important issues, whilst taking care not to provide answers.
To quote the director herself,
Instinct is a film about power. It’s about two people who are trying to manipulate and dominate one another and who, therefore, end up in a very toxic situation, with each of them bringing out the wounded child in the other; the wounded child that we all have inside of us.
This first fiction feature has played in the top film festivals where it has won many awards including Locarno’s Variety Piazza Grande Award and special mention in First Feature Competition, Toronto, BFI London, Gent and Chicago. It is also the first film by the production company Man Up that Reijn formed with the star of Instinct, Carice van Houten who is best known today for Game of Thrones.
Both she and the male lead, Marwan Kenzari (Aladdin) are outstanding in their very difficult roles.
Watching a pathologically sexually active woman go head on with a pathological sexual predator was almost too much to bear. When I consider the analogous Last Tango in Paris and Empire of the Senses, both male versions of sexual extremism, while they were shocking in their day and probably could not even be made today, they were not a woman’s take on extreme sexuality. In both those, the woman was the object of the male sexuality.
In this film and in the Danish submission for Best International Feature Oscar Nomination, (Queen of Hearts) it is the woman aggressing the male. I wonder that the most advanced and liberal nations in the world are dealing with this…The two stories are extreme and watching them, witnessing them really, I felt my own thin veneer of sexual propriety being stripped as I watched, leaving me feeling naked and exposed.
I almost want to tell the director, as a woman, to stop, draw a line, do not reveal too much about the extremes of the female psyche, though I know it is with artistic integrity that she show us this.
Instinct is the first outing for Man Up, the production banner of Halina and Carice. MAN UP’s goal is to create films and television drama with high current value and relevance, told from a female perspective. To explore darker, edgy stories that, through shame or fear, often remain untold. Quality, artistic integrity and openness to their audiences defines the productions of MAN UP.
Halina was professionally trained at the Maastricht Academy of Dramatic Arts and in 1997 debuted on stage as Ophelia in Hamlet, directed by Theu Boermans. She continued to act on stage in such productions as Shopping & Fucking, Three Sisters, Mourning Becomes Electra, Hedda Gabler, La Voix Humaine, The Fountainhead and recently Obsession, opposite Jude Law. Halina works with internationally acclaimed director Ivo van Hove at the International Theatre Amsterdam, performing their plays all over the world.
She starred in the Oscar nominated film Zus & Zo, in Paul Verhoeven’s critically acclaimed Black Book and in Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, opposite Tom Cruise. She can also be seen in the Swedish series Conspiracy of Silence, directed by Charlotte Brändström.
In 2005, her first novel Prinsesje Nooitgenoeg (Prometheus) debuted, followed by Halina: doen alsof ik iemand anders ben (Prometheus, 2009), Antiglamour (co-written with Carice van Houten, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2013), and Loos (Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2016). She is working on film scripts and television series based on original ideas. In 2019, Halina was named one of 20 most influential people in the Dutch media by a leading Dutch newspaper. She writes columns for Dutch and Belgian magazines and newspapers and is regularly a co-host on one of the best watched daily news shows on Dutch TV.
