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Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Excellent but underrated film

best movie i've ever seen.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The Treatment tackles several topics, the main being child abuse. The gloomy weather of Belgium depicted on screen adds to the bleak atmosphere. The authors were obviously trying to rise up to the challenge of current Scandinavian crime thrillers and partially they've been successful.Overall, The Treatment is a good movie for audience with a strong stomach looking for a dark crime thriller. Given the themes it explores it never crosses the line of bad taste or sensationalism.However, roughly at the half of the movie, we've ran into several Hollywood clichés. There is a police officer with questionable mental stability who pursues cases alone, often following no rules or logic apart from his premonition. And the "main villain" looked and behaved as if he came out of a random movie about serial killers. As if European democracies allow you to do whatever you want within your own four walls and stockpile any possible substance, even gallons of urine, without anyone even noticing, let alone informing the authorities...

There are two central themes in Hans Herbots's Belgian tres noir The Treatment: the need for closure and misogyny.Inspector Nick Cafmeyer's investigation of some pedophiliac murders is driven by his own childhood experience. When he was nine his younger brother Bjorn was kidnapped and has not been heard from since. Nick is still harassed by Ivan Plettinckz, a suspect released for want of evidence. Nick's obsession with solving Bjorn's disappearance both advances and hinders his pursuit of the current killer. By solving the present crime and saving another child Nick finally puts behind him his unwarranted guilt for not having protected his brother. His chase of the killer brings him back to the physical site of Bjorn's disappearance — the railway tracks — which is also the psychological site. The film begins and ends with shots of the two boys walking along those tracks, playing cowboys and indians, with cowboy Nick poking an arrow at Indian Bjorn. Within this image of innocence the theme is already the hunter and the hunted, reversible.Plettinckz is himself in need of closure. He teases Nick with promises of information about Bjorn. His inability to leave Nick alone is as compulsive as Nick's guilt. His last clue takes Nick to a buried box of videos of criminal pedophilia. He finally admits his guilt when, after sending Nick to dig up this buried past, he hangs himself. By initially withholding the criminal videos and by both attending and not reporting Plettinckz's suicide Nick seriously compromises himself as an investigator. So, too, when he pulps the killer seeing Plettinckz's laughing face.The killer inflicts another torment on his victims. Impotent, he forces the fathers to rape their little sons. Every attack spreads the trauma rendering those victims in need of perhaps an impossible closure. The impossibility of complete closure is also reflected when Bjorn (who is still alive so many years later) is left to die in a remote caravan, his "friend" Nancy in jail because of the videos Nick finally passed on. In the novel Nick finds Bjorn. The film's solution avoids an improbable happy ending in this most noir of worlds.As Nick "treats" his guilt by preventing recurrence of the crime, the killer "treats" his impotence by a sick misogyny. He blames a mysterious female hormone for weakening him and wards it off with his urine. Hence the urine pouring under the door at the victim mother in his last crime. Hence, too, his storage of his urine as a disinfectant. His theft of (feminine, dangerous) milk sets Nick on his trail. The killer is a split personality. One self considers giving the police the pictures he found. The other believes himself to be a more evolved human being, hindered only by the weakening impact of woman. Of course fear of le petit mort and the vagina dentata is a terror as old as manhood itself. Here it's displayed in psychopathic proportions.The themes converge in the urine. Urine is like the past, something we go through (or that goes through us) and that we properly leave behind. The villain's storage of his urine is as debilitating as the hero's storage of his guilt. That's a surprising bit of poetic irony in this compelling, gripping trek through the dark psyche.

I haven't read the novel this is based on (I've been told the novel is better, but it's tough for a movie to live up to the expectations, especially because this is based on all the twists the story takes and the guessing of who the bad guy is amongst other things), but the movie is really great.The central performance is amazing and unlike other crime movies it is not that easy to guess where this is going (if you haven't read the book). The twists and turns the story take are absolutely marvelous. Though that might not be the right word for it, we do get a movie that feels real. And even when we are a step ahead of the detective, it's not as if he's a bad cop. There is so much going on, he can't know everything ... sometimes not knowing can be tough though ...

"The Treatment" is very dark Belgian thriller, wonderfully directed, never boring, with great music and a brilliant damaged main character.In the wrong hands, the movie could have turned out a big cliché, but narrative is so well done, that it pretty much keeps you guessing how it ends.It's not a movie for the squeamish due to several scenes of abuse. Even the implied, off-screen brutality might not be for everyone. I was very surprise of the high production quality. Until now, "Bullhead" was for me a Belgian film that set high standards in the dark crime genre, but "The Treatment" is a far more balanced and gritty movie.If you like the "Prisoners", "Se7en", "True Detective" or "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", be sure not to miss this!