Ben X (2007)

Too much of everything

Sorry, this movie sucks

How sad is this?

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

In his debut, Nic Balthazar skillfully mixes different social topics: addiction to video games, autism and also school bullying. Even though its scenes are sometimes excessive, Ben X is both a visual and a psychological punch. The video game universe provides Ben with a perfect shelter in which he finds the strength to continue living in real life. Also, this addiction will help him to do some discoveries and encounters. The many connections established between reality and the game are relevant. At the end, the film leads to wonder where the limits between reality and fiction are and it also shows that a video game can have both negative and positive consequences in the real world. Nic Balthazar cleverly mixes these two universes in order to get a hyperrealist and moving result that portrays a merciless world that constantly reject those who are different. Full review on our blog Los Indiscretos : https://losindiscretos.org

A well constructed film about a boy with autism that escapes into a popular RPG to escape harsh reality. The film's messages are obvious, but mostly handled with care. It does go a bit too dark and then a bit too light for my tastes. The first hour had me angered and intrigued, but the last 30 minutes are a bit too schmaltzy and light. It doesn't completely gloss over the difficult issues, but the film soon corners itself in a place where no ending would have been satisfactory. A distant but understandable performance from Timmermans makes this an easy watch, and the jumps between life and the computer world are simple and controlled.

"Ben X" is a word pun in Belgian Dutch and could also be read as "ben niks", which means "I am nothing" in English. In fact, Ben, the teenage protagonist of Nic Baltazar's first feature film, has lost contact to the world that surrounds him and does not want to play any role in it. He lacks communication skills, and does not seem to be bothered by that. The sad result is that he is bullied by his classmates in the most atrocious ways, a treatment that he does not even try to resist.On the other hand there is Scarlite, a beautiful girl, that seems to be in a way connected to Ben. When two of his classmates, Desmet and Bogaert, have taken his mobile phone away from him during another bully attack, they find a picture of Scarlite and a message telling him that she is going to meet him the next day at the train station. They are full of surprise: how could a guy that does not speak to anyone have such a lovely girlfriend? The answer is that Ben has created a parallel world of his own, playing online games. In cyber space he has met a girl who uses the name of "Scarlite", and who has become a collaborator in his adventures and even a kind of confidant or friend who intuitively guesses what is behind his plan to play the so-called "endgame": he is planning to commit suicide, and almost instantaneously she volunteers to be his "healer".But the meeting in the real world turns out to take shape in the only way that seems to be possible for a guy that is suffering from the Asperger syndrome: Although Ben sees Scarlite at the train station, he is unable to communicate with her. It is as if suddenly a barrier has appeared which he cannot penetrate. The girl finally walks away, but Ben forces himself to follow her and steps into the train that she takes and even manages to sit down next to her. Then, noting that he is in some sort of pain, she simply asks him if he is fine. Ben again cannot respond in a way a non-autistic person would do, and he hurriedly escapes from the train and loses track of Scarlite.Is this the end? In the next scene Ben is seen on a platform ready to jump. But when a train arrives and he is about to carry out his plan, he is miraculously saved by Scarlite who pulls him back. As it later becomes clear, this second appearance of Scarlite, in which she proves to be the "healer", preventing him from suicide, is no more than a construction of his imagination: Scarlite is present throughout most parts of the remaining footage, but she is never seen interacting with members of the real world, for instance Ben's parents, and in the final scene she virtually disappears, after seemingly having had a conversation with Ben the moment before.It therefore seems as if Ben is sitting alone and talking to himself. Strange situation, but thinking about it well, this must be taken as the only possible solution for his life. As it is difficult to establish a well-working human relationship for most autistic people, the salvation could lie in the imaginative forces of the mind.We might even call it love. Although the idea that autists are able to develop such a feeling must be new even to experts, the facts of the film are quite clear: Ben has become attached to Scarlite - or the idea of Scarlite - and after she saved him from suicide, he accepted her as a kind of personal healer. He has failed to approach her using the patterns of social behavior that a non-autistic person would use, but nonetheless nothing is lost. Using the forces of imagination, from that moment onwards Scarlite will be a part of his life. He will not stop loving her, and this imagined relationship might even prove to be more stable than a real one.

Ben X (2007)A gutsy, complex, fast, multi-layered dive into both autism and the alternate realities of video gaming. The parallels are obvious but well mined--main character Ben, played by an all too convincing Greg Timmermans, inhabits the internal worlds of both, and confuses them, and confuses us. The romance, the violence, the interview modes, the interior monologues, and the phantom scenes that shift from graphics to reality and back, are all layered together with a kind of logical fluidity that makes the movie oddly beautiful, even though you wouldn't normally call this "beautiful" in the sentimental sense. But beauty is important, even when Ben calls his "girlfriend" beautiful, because it is his mind that makes her beautiful, and according to ideals he has absorbed somewhere (culturally, from the media, from wherever). It doesn't match the ideals of the video game, not visually (thankfully). In fact, Ben's world is ideal except where it has to merge or overlap with ours.That intersection, in the end, is the point of it all, and the tension in watching it all. The horror of the culture that makes fun of him (beyond reason, we hope, but effectively) and the fantasy of getting even, of making a point of their cruelty, is a triumph we share. The final scenes, maybe slightly over the top, too, are also reasonable. The opposite of high tech, computer reality, is maybe exactly what might balance this young man's world.As a film, there are echoes of so many other films--from The Graduate to Matrix to Rain Man to Ondskan--you can't help but appreciate how original it still is. Even if this isn't your reality at all, you can totally get sucked into it on its own terms.