Mystery Thriller ‘Moresnet,’ Canneseries Competition Entry, Explores What It Means to Be Human, Director and Writer Explain
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Mystery thriller “Moresnet,” which had its world premiere this week at TV festival Canneseries, is set in a sleepy village in Belgium, Moresnet, but underneath the placid surface dark forces lurk.
Variety spoke to writer Jef Hoogmartens and director Frank Van Passel about the show, which is being distributed by Newen Connect.
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The series centers on a group of adults who used to be friends when they were children, but were traumatized when one of them, Daan, murdered another for no apparent reason.
Two decades later the friends – minus Daan, who is locked up in the local asylum – gather in the village again after Daan’s brother Ben returns for his father’s funeral. The friends decide to dig up a time capsule they buried on the night of the murder. In that, they find Daan’s diary. On the last page, Ben discovers a list of names… with the death dates of his friends. Within 10 days, each of them will die.
Ben and one of the friends, journalist Zoë, race to prevent their predicted demise. Their quest leads to Thalamus, a German neuro-technology multinational, owned by the brilliant Nobel Prize winner Robert Rolin and his successor and granddaughter, Eva.
Van Passel explains that there are multiple undercurrents at work in the story, one of which is the clash between two philosophies: one believing in the malleability of life, and the other the inevitability of fate.
Van Passel says: “We want to connect that with a very contemporary feeling of uneasiness, of an anxiety that people have, very logically, due to political evolutions, an ecological doomsday feeling, a technology/AI dangerous feeling.
“So, we wanted to connect with these general feelings of unease, which in our minds also connected a little bit to the film noir of the 50s and the 60s, where people are really afraid of the Cold War.”
The series also addresses how people react to trauma.
Hoogmartens says: “It wasn’t the idea from the get-go, but it really developed into a story about trauma and about loss, and it became like a sad undercurrent beneath it all, because, yes, we wanted to make an entertaining TV show with edge of your seat moments, but we also wanted to give it a sense of unease, and something is going on. We had to find a way to make that unease in a way relatable or touchable, and the feeling of loss or the feeling of a trauma that you haven’t faced yet has that kind of unease inherently inside of it.”
Van Passel adds: “I think the feeling of loss and grief has a lot to do with time, with accepting time or not accepting time, accepting your fate or not accepting your fate.
“In the preparation of the series, we were reading Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari’s books about ‘Homo Deus,’ where he was explaining that there are people in the world who are so extremely rich that they already have the possibility to become 150 years old, just by deploying bionics – like in ‘The Six Billion Man’ – changing the parts of their bodies. And in one sense, this is so absurd because what in God’s name is the point? I can understand that people want to find a way to become God and to stay alive, but there is beauty in accepting the fact that life is short, and it can be finished from one day to another, and the acceptance or non-acceptance of this feeling defines you as a person.
“And in that sense, almost all the characters in the series are in some kind of fight with that feeling. Grief is something we all know, certainly enough, but also luckily enough, and just the idea that you would like to become some kind of ‘Homo Deus’ means that you don’t accept the point of life. So that battle is a battle we’re talking about. And it’s a fight that everybody’s fighting one way or another, be it conscious or not.
“I do think that this is the underlying feeling in the series. It’s almost a melancholy of grievances that everybody has, and not accepting the things that happened in your life. It again defines you as a human being and our main character, Ben, has a huge trauma in him, which he never addressed. All his life, he has been running away from it, which makes him an interesting main character, because he does not want to be in the show. He wants to run away as fast as possible. That’s a feeling we recognize.”
There seems to be a contrast between the young characters, including Eva, and the older ones. The younger people all have a tentative nature and seem to be lacking in confidence. They are a little nervous all the time, like a cat feeling its way around a dark room.
For Van Passel, things are not clear in the series, they are not black and white. “I mean, in our kind of story, a mystery thriller, it’s very easy to assume that it is a story about good and bad, but it’s not, because everything is good and bad in itself. And that’s also in the approach of the acting. There’s always some vagueness. It’s not always clear. What seems to be good is bad, what seems to be bad is good. So, for a character, there’s always a kind of hesitation, some kind of mistrust toward what’s in front of you.
“I think we are entering a technological time and of course, everybody’s talking all the time now about AI, etc. But the philosophical questions – What is a human being? What are we? Are we still a body? Are we our mind? Are we some data in a computer? – are becoming extremely important.
“But also, we have to rethink ourselves. And we have to rethink the idea: What is a human being? And so, in the approach of the characters in ‘Moresnet’ in that sense, I think that these are extremely contemporary characters. There’s this hesitation. We don’t know what the next step will be. So, there’s some kind of hesitation toward reality. Is reality still reality or not?”
Hoogmartens adds: “The younger characters seem to have more doubts, and are not as single-minded, but the older characters, Robert, for example, are just as doubtful, but not able to express the doubt because expressing the doubts could mean that your whole life was thrown away. Eva in Episode Two says: ‘Am I making a mistake? What will he think of me?’ She almost in a way has the gift of being young and being able to doubt herself and can take another road. Just talking about myself, I just became 40 years old, and I had a sense that: What if I was not supposed to be a screenwriter? I’m 40 and I can’t do anything else, so I have to convince the world I’m good at this.’ I’m not going to show doubt. So, I think there’s also a sense of that. In a way, I believe that the older you get, the more doubt seeps in. It’s a very interesting dynamic between the age groups in our story, but in the end, it’s about: What does it mean to be a human being and to live knowing you’re going to die?”
Robert Rolin appears to be a kind of archetypal evil person, but he has other aspects to him. Van Passel says: “Robert Rolin is an extremely complex character who looks like a first-degree villain but there’s a lot underneath. And I must say, Jef, when he was writing the script, he did write a biography for Robert Rolin, which was about 30 pages long, filled with how this character was built. It’s extremely complex in one sense because it has a lot to do with the fact that he has a huge background history. He’s a descendant from a long family line of industrial people living in Moresnet. He has a huge connection with his past. He hates his father, and there’s a huge sense of revenge in him. And this has to do with the family history.
“I do think that what he’s doing – and I do not want to spoil the story too much – is so connected to our philosophical idea about what it is to be a human being. I don’t think he’s a villain. I believe in what he’s doing. And, of course, he’s also a man of his time. He was raised in the 50s and the 60s, and just as my parents, they didn’t talk too much, they didn’t analyse too much. They did. They just did. They were ambitious. They were not stupid. I think they are smart. Robert is a scientist who has had a lot of success, who is working in a technology that is making huge steps forward. What he wants for himself is something he also wants for the rest of the world, only to achieve that goal, he has to be extremely egoistic.”
Eva and Robert represent different views of science. Eva wants to release the company’s patents so that people can have access to the drugs, but Rob wants to keep control of things. But they also are polar points apart in terms of their willingness to change.
Hoogmartens says: “Eva stands, in a way, for change, and that there is a different path that we can take. Maybe it’s also a bit naive, but I think a bit of naivety is necessary for change. There is a bit of ‘Let’s keep things as they are,’ and ‘No, let’s change things.’
“The feeling of change and keeping things the same is a constant struggle and it’s what Moresnet is about. It’s totally changed.
“And it’s also like with Ben: the refusal to change himself. So, we wanted to infuse that in all the characters and on a big business level Robert and Eva are almost the tentpoles of that idea.
“Robert is a character who’s so not into doing things differently. He is also the one who wants to do the basic, natural thing of being human differently. So, it’s also nuanced.
“I think the fact that also, the difference between a young woman leading a company and a man in his 70s, it must be different. But that being said, it doesn’t mean that Eva’s way of thinking is the be all end all of business because it could be catastrophic the things she wants to introduce. That’s what change always does. It could be for the better. It could be for the worse.”
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