Written by Eline ter Horst
With stark imagery, bold sound design, and intense performances, Jan Verdijk’s feature debut Kind explores the emotional and psychological lengths parents might go to for a ‘healthy’ child.
Source: Kind (Verdijk, 2025).
Kind doesn’t try to ease you in: you're immediately thrown into the raw, quiet grief of Leon (Vincent van der Valk) and Jaimy (Noortje Herlaar) as they experience a miscarriage of their son, Mick. A small, bright red plastic windmill spins over the tiny grave in their garden - a simple, heartbreaking image that sticks with you, quietly echoing throughout the entire film. As the couple goes for check-ups in the hospital, a nurse hands them a brochure for "Moeders van Nature" (Mothers of Nature). Leon resists, sceptical of anything outside conventional medicine. Jaimy, however, remains open to alternative care and makes the call. Soon enough, Nicole (Tamar van den Dop), a holistic midwife, appears in their living room. What begins as seemingly gentle, natural treatments – sea salt, oils, and candles – slowly and insidiously morphs into something far more extreme and, frankly, terrifying. Nicole, with an unnerving confidence, tells Leon that Jaimy is not only already pregnant again, but that the baby is a girl, and she will ensure the child is born. Even after an unknown growth abnormality is found in their unborn baby, Nicole insists the child will be born. From there, the story starts to blur the line between alternative holistic remedies and psychological manipulation. Herbal diets, meditation circles, and acupuncture evolve into something much more ambiguous. When a scan reveals the baby has a rare growth disorder, Jaimy and Leon are pulled into increasingly spiritual explanations. Nicole tells them Mick’s “soul” is still in the womb. Jaimy begins to pull away. Leon, surprisingly, does not. To me, this is where Kind is at its strongest: watching Leon spiral from skeptic to believer, not through a sudden conversion, but seemingly through fear. He starts seeing a visual representation of Mick's soul as a shadowy, dancing wind, a truly unnerving and consistent visual motif that reflects his crumbling sanity and deepening obsession with holistic remedies. The film’s soundscape plays a crucial role here, with the wind’s omnipresent hum and distorted music underscoring Leon’s descent. The colour palette desaturates as the couple’s emotional world collapses and drives them apart, transforming bright yellows into muted grays, and dimming sunlight. Almost all dialogue between the couple turns confrontational. Leon insists on protecting the baby, on making the “right” decisions, but it’s clear that what he’s clinging onto is control, not genuine care, which ends up isolating Jaimy and discrediting her opinions.
Source: Kind (Verdijk, 2025).
The third act pushes the story to the edge of plausibility. After the baby’s prognosis worsens, Leon agrees to Nicole’s proposal: a ritual to release Mick’s spirit. Jaimy is bound with cloths on a table, blindfolded. Leon confronts the ghost of Mick outside, in a stylized, windy sequence while a windmill spins violently beside a tiny casket. When Jaimy’s water breaks mid-ritual, and Nicole calmly hands Leon a sterilized utility knife, things escalate into body horror. It’s a bold swing – one that will undoubtedly provoke strong reactions – and may be, for some, perhaps too much. For me, this is the most chilling element apart from the visual horror. The portrayal of control, particularly over Jaimy’s body. Though pregnant, she becomes increasingly sidelined in decisions about her health and her child. Nicole addresses Leon, not Jaimy. He enforces the rituals. And in the film’s climax scene, Jaimy is literally bound and blindfolded during a spiritual ceremony. Her body is treated as a tool in someone else’s belief system. This, to me, was deeply disturbing, and perhaps exactly what Verdijk wants to provoke in the viewer.
Source: Kind (Verdijk, 2025).
Tonally, Kind resembles Midsommar. It never fully commits to the horror genre with outright scares, but its musical scoring and pervasive atmosphere certainly evoke a creeping dread. This ambiguity between psychological torment and potential supernatural presence truly starts around the halfway mark. Keeping you constantly on edge is a great strength of this film. The performances really anchor the film, though some choices are certainly worth discussing. Herlaar delivers a nuanced, deeply affecting performance as Jaimy. You see her initial openness to Nicole's alternative methods slowly crumble into weary scepticism and then desperate resistance as things go too far. Her journey is truly heartbreaking to watch. Leon is pushed to his absolute limits by grief and fear, desperate for any solution. Van der Valk convincingly plays Leon as a man unravelling under the weight of grief and fear. His descent from rational scepticism into obsessive belief is well-executed, though at times his performance felt a bit over-the-top for me. Still, these moments serve the film’s mood, heightening the sense of a man blinded by desperation and control. What holds Kind back from greatness is partially its pacing, and partially in its overreliance on ambiguity. While the atmosphere is consistently strong, character development sometimes takes a backseat to mood. Some emotional beats feel skipped, especially around Jaimy’s changing state of mind. The horror elements are effective, but would have benefited from sharper internal logic. Still, for a debut, this is ambitious work. Kind is definitely an original piece in the current Dutch cinematic landscape, and that alone to me makes it worth watching.
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