SHORT REVIEW VERSION
⭐ Rating
⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆ (3.5/5)
✅ Pros
- ✔ Good film craft: gripping opening sequence and a smart voice-over twist.
- ✔ Carnival energy: the movie delivers genuine chaotic energy from a big red button to a homemade aeroplane.
- ✔ Agency through actions: the film lets its main charachter grow through physical labour.
- ✔ Moments of catharsis: moments like laughing after clicking a big red button are fun to watch.
❌ Cons
- ✖ Questionable power/consent dynamic. The first (questionable) sexual encounter in the film is left with no consent signalling and quickly swept under the rug as if it never happened.
- ✖ PJ is introduced and sustained as an object of male desire for the group: concluding in the classic pregnancy and a wedding trope.
- ✖ The narrative structure is disjointed: Fransje’s mom, his brother and father all have vivid subplots that are left unresolved. Another aeroplane plot is effectively abandoned and then randomly revived for five seconds at the end.
- ✖ Unearned buildup to the importance of Joe’s (real) name.
Trigger Warnings from Reviewer?
Traumatic accident and coma, abuse by a family member, questionable power/consent sexual content, Graphic recklessness and bodily harm (plane crash, muscle tear that ends athletic career)
Age Recommendation from Reviewer?
16+
Reviewer recommends it for…
Viewers interested in book-to-screen adaptations, Dutch/Flemish provincial cinema. (Not recommended for anyone seeking carefully handled consent dynamics.)
📖 Plot Summary
Fransje, a teenager in the Dutch countryside, has an accident that leaves him wheelchair-bound. At the annual kermis, his brother, Dirk, locks him in a dark room, and jams the wheelchair wheels with a metal rod. Joe Speedboot finds him and gives him a single-red-button remote that kills the power to the entire kermis, making Fransje laugh. Together with Christof they build a homemade aeroplane in an old hangar that Joe crashes. PJ (Picoline Jane) enters the story and becomes the shared object of desire for the boys. After graduation, Fransje remains in Lomark, and works with his hands. After years of labour, Joe returns and trains Fransje to become an arm-wrestler. They travel to a competition in Germany but in the final match Fransje tears a muscle and his athletic career ends. Joe uses the earnings to buy a huge truck and leaves for a desert rally in Africa. PJ asks to read Fransje’s diaries; he agrees only if she reads every page aloud. After a sexual encounter, between them, PJ marries Christof while pregnant and continues sleeping with Fransje whenever Christof is away. Joe reappears in the aeroplane at the wedding, destroying the ceremony and making Fransje laugh.
1. The Film's Core
Have you ever experienced that quiet, unsettling disconnect where your mind races at full speed while your body simply checks out? That is the emotional tension Joe Speedboot explores. Set in a sleepy 1990s Dutch village, Sam de Jong’s film translates the physical and psychological friction between mind and body into a heightened, theatrical coming-of-age story.
Our narrator, Fransje, is wheelchair-bound following a tragic accident. His brother, Dirk, leaning into villainous cruelty, actively deepens this paralysis, most egregiously at the annual village kermis, where he locks Fransje in a dark room and jams his wheels with a metal rod. Enter the film’s namesake, Joe Speedboot: a force of pure chaos who frees Fransje and hands him a single red button that cuts power to the entire carnival.
As Joe escalates from one reckless stunt to another, a low-level dread settles into the viewer. Having witnessed Fransje’s sudden bodily harm in the opening sequence, every subsequent moment, whether Joe is standing on flimsy metal frame in a hangar or speeding down rural roads, keeps the body tensed for inevitable impact. At its heart, Joe Speedboot asks a fundamental question: where does the mind end and the body begin, and what happens to those who crash in both? The central query of this review becomes clear: can a film so determined to keep us off-balance genuinely connect with us?
2. The Film's Journey
At the start of this story is Fransje, a young man whose philosophy is simple: 'if I can just make my body unbreakable, maybe the world can’t touch me.' and so he begins by lying down in a field as a giant harvester approaches, attempting to become a "body of stone..." as is the samurai way. but the universe answers him with the hard truth.
After the accident, the body he tried to harden becomes his helplessness. His brother Dirk treats him like a burden to be managed rather than a soul. While some siblings fight over the controller, Dirk actively fights for the title of worst person in the village. So how do you keep living when the people closest to you refuse to meet you where you are?
The answer comes quick in the form of Joe Speedboat. Their friendship is beautiful but medically inadvisable. It starts when Joe hands Fransje a single red button that blackouts an entire carnival. The film moves from being Fransje's private war against his own limitations to being a shared, reckless adventure. And later with Joe's vision and training, Fransje’s right arm transforms into something otherworldly strong reshaping his relationship with his body and limits.
By the end of the film, there is no neat healing. Almost everyone else gets to move on into something else, with two of Fransje's friends marrying, Christof and PJ (even though according to Fransje, she continues sleeping with him before and after the wedding.). What remains for Fransje is sitting at their ruined wedding, watching Joe fly a plane straight into their friends' ceremony, and laughing. The character development is essentially "I can’t leave, but I can enjoy a spoiled show." The final takeaway is that sometimes the only power left is to laugh at dark comedy.
There is one directing choice in this film that stayed with me long after the credits rolled, the decision to withhold the true nature of the voice-over for nearly the entire runtime.
For most of the film, we are held inside a soft, feminine narration that speaks from the perspective of Fransje. I was confused at first as it seemed like a strange experimental gender casting fumble. Then, near the end, Fransje's love interest, PJ sits down and begins reading his diaries aloud, and the voice over voice is revealed: we were never inside Fransje’s mind; we were listening to what PJ wanted us to hear from his diaries. The film softly lands the greatest jump scare for narrative theory students.
Where the film falters, however, is in its blank, almost indifferent handling of the first sexual encounter between PJ and Fransje. By staging an intimate encounter involving a non-verbal protagonist with no clear consent signaling and complete visual neutrality, the film abdicates its ethical responsibility. The camera simply observes, leaving both Fransje and the audience stranded. The film gives more emotional direction to a homemade-plane crash than to an intimate situation involving a character who cannot speak, leaving its ethical priorities stranded in the hangar.
4. A Moment On Cinematography
Two completely different visual energies live inside the same frame. Fransje’s world is held in wide, horizontal compositions. The camera stays calm and grounded, mirroring the weight of the flat Dutch landscape. There is a quiet, documentary patience in those shots, a sense of being observed rather than free to move. But the moment Joe arrives, the camera changes its approach the frame tilts, inverts, and rushes, placing the sky where the ground should be.
Central to this visual language is the film's most striking image: the crashed aeroplane standing nose-first in the dirt. It is absurd, and completely defeated all at once like the myth of Icarus, but make it Dutch. The camera holds on the wreckage long enough for the contradiction to settle into a singular monument of soaring ambition and inevitable fall.
5. A Moment On Sound
From the opening moments, the harvester sequence slams back and forth between peaceful, silent grass and the ugly, rising mechanical roar of the machine until your nervous system braces for something unavoidable.
The score plays across a wildly unhinged spectrum. Anne Teikari handles the film's internal atmosphere with tracks that are just as tense as the story itself, most notably "Het Zwaard," which spirals into chaotic intensity before abruptly slicing off with a sharp, literal cutting sound, echoing the physical severing of Fransje's body. Surrounding these instrumental spikes are 1980s synth-pop nostalgia music highlighted by songs like Job & Fred Band’s track "Snelle Boot." Its playful guitars and restless pace match the chaotic nature of Joe Speedboat himself, injecting the fun high of the soundtrack.
6. Conclusion: What Stays After?
"The most honest stories remind us how to still be capable of wonder inside the mess of the life we actually have."
When the screen goes dark, something stays in the body. Days later, you can still hear the rising roar of the harvester. Alongside that physical dread sits a more complicated discomfort: Dirk's unexamined cruelty and the red flag relationship between PJ and Fransje.
You also remember Fransje’s laughter. Because the film also hands out joy like a limited-edition drop, those moments land with extraordinary purity. So why does this matter? Because so many of us live somewhere between those two states with not many moments of pure, unexpected aliveness.
The most honest stories remind us how to remain awake, and still be capable of wonder inside the mess of the life we actually have.
Suzie holds two Master’s degrees: in Media Studies from Utrecht University and English Studies from the University of Szeged. She has served on two film festival juries, including the prestigious European University Film Award.
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