This Dutch horror thriller sets out its stall from the get-go, with some of the darkest and macabre opening credits I’ve seen for a long while. And the gruesomeness never really lets off throughout this six-part drama about a 14-years old girl, Minke Moorman (Andrea Vass), who disappears one day and returns three years later a changed girl with a huge tattoo on her back.
If you want to avoid all spoilers, stop reading this article now.
Before she goes missing, Minke is a typical teenager daughter. She’s moody and disobedient towards her parents, Lucas and Eva (Marcel Hensema and Rikfa Lodeizen). So, when she fails to return home overnight, they are not initially disconcerted. But when they track her phone and find it abandoned on the roadside, they alert the authorities.
Lucas and Eva are a wealthy and successful couple – he’s a senior police officer and she’s the new town’s mayor. But their lives are thrown into turmoil when, despite the best endeavours of the fabulously named Asha Trustfull, the investigating police officer, there are no clues about what happened to their daughter.
Then three years later, out of the blue, Minke is found by a lorry driver who nearly runs her over on the road. But Minke is a very different girl. Not only has she returned with the freshly inked tattoo on her back, but her personality has also altered significantly, and she’s clearly been traumatised by her ordeal. Things have changed in the Moorman house too. Lucas is sleeping in the summer house whilst his wife and her new lover are sleeping together in the main house.
Detective Trustfull continues her investigations into what happened to Minke, warning her father – a fellow police officer, of course – not to get involved. As you might expect, he ignores this and covertly takes a photo of his daughter’s back tattoo when she’s showering in order to show the picture around the local tattoo parlours. It’s only later when he looks closely at the picture does he see the face of his daughter in the bathroom mirror smiling at him with an evil grin on her face.
We also see that Minke is waking herself up at 1am in the morning and going out into the garden, where she’s met by a group of spooky hooded and masked individuals performing some sort of ritualistic gathering. Are these her captors?
This starts out as a straight-forward missing child thriller – but it quickly develops into something more chilling, bordering on the horror-genre. In particularly when we spot the reflected image of Minke in the bathroom mirror – that’s a real horror movie moment.
‘Sphinx' will appeal to those of you with a penchant for the more bizarre end of the thriller genre. It’s well written and the acting is solid throughout, particularly from young Andrea Vass in the lead role. Definitely one to watch.
Walter Presents: ‘Sphinx' is available to stream as a boxset on C4 Streaming now.
