When It Melts Review: A Coming-of-Age Tale That’s Lurid for Lurid’s Sake

It’s no spoiler to say that the poster art for Veerle Baetens’s When It Melts is a con. No one in this film ever aims a gun at their head. In fact, not a single gun is glimpsed across its entire runtime. But this image, suggestive of both suicide and Russian roulette, is a clever key to the lurid propulsion of this ostensibly faithful adaptation of Lize Spit’s debut novel from 2015, as this is a film that lives and dies on the games that it plays with audiences.

When It Melts lingers quietly with Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne), a young woman living in Brussels with a secret trauma that colors her perceptions, even her every move. From the way she stops and leans against a building, letting a group of rowdy individuals pass her on the street so as to avoid a possible collision, you sense that there was a time when she had wished that she had similarly checked herself. Standing on the balcony of her apartment, gazing down at the street below, you feel her compulsion to jump. But first, there’s work to be done, and it would seem to have something to do with the enormous block of ice that Eva places in the trunk of her car.

It’s easy to forget that block of ice, because it won’t be seen again for another 90 minutes. Even when ice is revealed to be an integral component of a game that three childhood friends used to play, you may not find yourself drawing any links between past and present because When It Melts, as written by Baetens, Spit, and Maarten Loix, is already springing other calculated teases, slowly stacking one on top of the other in order to throw us off its narrative scent.

Almost as soon as Eva sets off for the town of her youth, to attend a memorial event for the brother of one of her childhood friends, the film flashes back to a time when these friends were first rocked by that death. Once the adult Eva has been largely relegated to a framing device, a certain calm descends over When It Melts, which does fine work simply observing the sensibilities of young children, as well as the difficult relationship between a young Eva (Rosa Marchant) and her mother (Naomi Velissariou). It’s also attuned to how difference shapes our experiences and perspectives, and how the lurch of pubescent lust can rewrite friendships.

But every time the film returns to the present, it becomes increasingly difficult to shake off that it doesn’t care to truly sit with Eva’s trauma, because it’s too busy withholding the “why” of its source for the purpose of entertainment. In the process, When It Melts takes on a lurid quality, as we wait for the adult Eva, a tabula rasa for the majority of the film, to have meaning inscribed upon her by whatever the great drama of her young life is meant to reveal about her.

When It Melts isn’t a thriller per se, but it certainly thrills to the possibility of what might happen to more than just Eva. Even as you find yourself understanding how and why Eva is roped into playing a game with her friends Tim (Anthony Vyt) and Laurens (Matthijs Meertens) whose aim is to have other girls shed their clothes, some uncertainty—as in the truth about the demise of a horse—worsens the leaden, sickening feeling that a trigger is about to be released.

And it is, in a scene that explains why When It Melts, which, regardless of its allegiance to the novel, has been written with a screenwriter’s sure knack for manipulation, will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival with a trigger warning of sorts. It’s easy to imagine that warning not having been necessary in a film less withholding, one more interested in resilience in the face of trauma. But this one is fixated on depicting sexual violence as a lamb being led to slaughter—violation as one to the audience itself. Which makes When It Melts’s ending feel especially gratuitous, as the one trajectory that the filmmakers are interested in above all else is how to chip away at our boundaries so that we, too, feel like ice were slowly melting beneath our feet.