Satire feeds on the contemporary. As new social issues and interests arise, satire helps us inspect them and make sense of their value in our changing world. Satire can disarm or emasculate through humor, but it can also be twisted into horror and used to heighten danger. The Columnist does both. First, the film makes us laugh at the preposterous nature of online trolls and the emotional weight we give them—and then, with a violent escalation of events, it shows us that words have meaning and they can be weaponized.
The Columnist takes an amplified look at trolls through the experiences of Femke Boot (Katja Herbers), a newspaper columnist and author in the Netherlands who is suffering from writer’s block. Her next book is due, and her publisher is waiting impatiently. But social media and construction near her home, where she writes, distract her to the point of inactivity. When threats on Twitter seem a little too real, she discovers that the police won’t help. She could take her protection into her own hands, but first she needs to write.
That is precisely when a slew of trolls target her in the comments section of her online column. Femke knows she shouldn’t read them, but she can’t peel herself away from the hateful messages spouting from the safety of internet anonymity.
With an easy search, Femke locates one particularly active troll. His address, personal photos, and life events are there, and she follows these breadcrumbs to confront him. The man looks like the basement-dweller she suspects him to be, and in a moment of unbridled anger, she kills him—violently and joyously.
She does not stop there. Femke keeps going, and her attacks against these vile armchair commenters escalate until she no longer resembles herself. As the bodies pile up, the tone of the film subtly shifts from a playful revenge fantasy to that of a woman who is no longer in control of her actions or words. Femke is aware enough to know that what she’s doing is wrong, but she has no intention of stopping.
To add to the intensity, The Columnist carries the torch of free speech. Femke believes that people can, and should, have differing opinions and live in peace with one another. We see her writing about this and talking on television in support of the coexistence of multiple viewpoints. She argues for the rights of her commenters, and the irony of her hunting her dissidents is never lost in The Columnist.
The film clearly understands that killing is wrong and that threatening people for their opinions is wrong too. But it gets thematically messy when it comes to the notion of silencing voices, and who has the right to hold the symbolic microphone. Femke is a likable, but her actions make us question her belief in her causes. And when her daughter takes up that same free-speech torch at school, Femke is forced to face her hypocrisy more directly than she anticipated.
None of this tonal tightrope or free-speech scrutiny would be possible without Herbers’ determined performance. Her ability to translate the satirical victim turned monster into a person who looks like she’d be fun at a cocktail party is the work of a graceful actress.
The Columnist is not subtle. It takes the fantasy of exposing the cowards who hide behind keyboards, and turns the vengeance up to 11. Bloody fun turns swiftly into an examination of the power of voice and the line between good guys and bad guys.
