The Dutch entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Academy Awards (though it didn’t make the final shortlist), TIRZA stars Gijs Scholten van Aschat as Jörgen Hofmeester, a weary, bemused man who is deemed superfluous both at work and at home, not least by his demanding ex-wife. Recently made redundant, Jörgen, a man who treats wine as medicine and his daughter Tirza as a talent to obsess over, becomes plagued by the past and sets out on a quest to find his prodigal daughter, who has apparently gone missing on a trip to Namibia. As his search becomes increasingly fruitless, Jörgen teams up, at first involuntarily, with a nine year old prostitute named Kaisa, trained to prey on lonely men’s desire for company, and they both scour the endless wilderness in search of the absent Tirza.

Directed by Rudolf van dan Berg, TIRZA is, like its protagonist, a multi-faceted, offbeat and dexterous film, filled with subtle plot twists and strong performances, not least by Aschat, who manages to be both an unlikeable buffoon with a skewed moral perception, and a loving, dedicated father who will stop at nothing to find peace. Similarly, like Jörgen, the film matches his fractured persona with an increasingly fractured narrative flow, which begins normally but gradually becomes more skewered as the walls dividing reality and the manifestations of his anxiety begin to break down, making way for slightly overwrought and murky undertones which bog the film down with slightly unnecessary, disconcerting depths.