SLAMDANCE 2023 Reviews: Remy van Heugten’s MASCOT confronts us with an extreme world without a simple way out of the violence

If the name “Jeremy” still makes you think of the boy who euphemistically “spoke in class today,” per the Pearl Jam song, Remy van Heugten’s Mascot is on your wavelength. This Jeremy (Liam Jeans), a handsome lad until he opens his mouth to reveal a massive dental deformity, is a troubled young man. On the surface, he might seem on the right track, working with his mother Abbey (Maartje Remmers), whom he addresses by her first name, at a home for the intellectually disabled. He also helps her take care of his younger sister Emine (Frederike van Oordt), who’s into Furries and energy drinks. But much like the obvious metaphor of his mouth, all is not well inside.

If we needed a sign that he might be an aspiring Tyler Durden, they don’t come more blatant than participation in a kind of fight club. While it seems to have more rules, it involves large groups of young men showing up in color coordinated Nike shirts and fingerless MMA gloves, then beating the crap out of each other on a field until time is called. It may be football-related; a throwaway line reveals Jeremy has been banned from the local stadium. But the main goal appears to be for the video footage to go viral, making the participants seem appealing to the shallowest of women their own age.

Jeremy’s eyes aren’t for his female peers, though. In a scene fraught with creepy tension, he helps his drunken mum to bed, and unzips her shirt and unbuttons her pants. Does he have horrible intentions, or is he merely ensuring her clothes aren’t uncomfortably tight to sleep in? The camera lingers. The audience hopes he makes the right call…

…and then in the next scene, he’s masturbating to video he surreptitiously shot earlier of his mother giving a bar patron a handjob. Mascot is serving some damn notice that it’s not going to be a safe journey. Jeremy, whose father left years ago and is apparently an abusive creep, has both ends of the Oedipus complex in full effect. As perfunctory explanation, the movie suggests that walking in on his mother having sex when he was 7 did something to him; she has made sure to only fuck out of the house ever since. But the way she uses sex transactionally surely has a trickle-down effect as well; she uses hookups to try to get with men who’ll help support her and the kids. While she’s still young.

Fundamentally, what Jeremy lacks is a sense of security. He’s forced into the role of man of the house, yet unable to do anything to help his mother when their source of employment dries up. Full of anger, he’s driven in some bad directions. And when the opportunity arises to fix his teeth, with the ostensible promise that it’ll make him a new man, the hope is that it may ease the traumatic memories of his father making fun of his mouth. The dubious, slim hope.

Dutch director van Heugten demonstrates here that you can understand a protagonist without necessarily liking them. Both Abbey and Jeremy are fundamentally broken people, still in their own way trying to protect Emine from being hurt in the same way by keeping her away from the bad dad she can’t remember. (When she tries to find him online, she encounters only pedophiles, because it’s that kind of movie.) Abbey’s drunken nights are all orange hazes; Jeremy’s gang fights are filmed with him looking lost and adrift with brawling all around him, like an appropriate metaphor for his life.

One could argue that where Jeremy ends up is too obvious – the extreme is extreme. Yet when one looks around at the real world outside, it too feels too obvious, too immune from subtlety to make sense, yet full of disempowered people pushing hate and violence. Jeremy’s a reflection of many people you probably know, most of them even less likely to afford multiple dental implants. In an American version of this tale, like the Pearl Jam video, a mass shooting would probably be next. The Netherlands has tougher gun laws, but nobody has a monopoly on violent rage.

The title “Mascot” serves as ironic counterpoint – Emine literally dresses up as a big, furry fox mascot character, expressing cuteness on the outside and an uncorrupted girl inside. She finds herself in that second skin, as so many Furries do. Jeremy, meanwhile, cannot sustain superficial cosmetic fixes, with his inside temperament ultimately ruining even the good parts of his outer behavior as well. Van Heugten makes clear that he sees Emine’s way forward as a solution, but has no easy answers for Jeremy. Maybe if confronted with the problem day in, day out, Mascot implies, we in the audience will eventually be forced to come up with some.