The Columnist review – middle class mum on a murder spree

There is absurdist carnage as a journalist takes bloody real-life revenge on the keyboard warriors tormenting her

To paraphrase Nietzsche: gaze too long into Twitter, and Twitter will gaze into you. Anyone who writes for a living on the internet has surely fantasised about payback time for all the keyboard warriors, callous below-the-liners and unrepentant trolls out there. Ivo van Aart's movie gives full rein to that desire and is snappily directed - but in the end there is something self-satisfied and sententious about his feminist revenge flick.

Katja Herbers plays Femke Boot, a newspaper columnist drowning in internet misogyny, especially after she steps out of her usual lifestyle remit to write an op-ed about Zwarte Piet, the Dutch blackface folkloric character. Her book publisher is pressurising her for juicier material to better compete with author-of-the-hour Steven Dood (Steven Death), a kohl-rimmed provocateur who savages her on a chatshow. Umbilically fed by her phone on a diet of shitposter abuse, she finally snaps when she realises her neighbour - partial to some Zwarte Piet himself - is one of her tormentors.