Social realism is alive and well and living in Belgium — but you knew that already, given that it’s the Dardennes’ home court. It may surprise you to find, however, that they aren’t the only ones playing the game anymore. Indeed, out from under the bleachers has emerged Alexe Poukine with Kika — her first narrative feature following a string of documentaries — and it s`ignals the arrival of a confident, if somewhat confused, social realist voice.
The film’s opening is quietly electric and clearly cut from the Dardennes mold: eponymous Kika is a social worker getting by in contemporary Brussels, when one day she strikes up an affair with bike mechanic David. Long takes and handheld frames place us right in the muck with our hero, and the meet-cute between Kika and David — a blessing-in-disguise lock-in after she accidentally breaks the front door of David’s shop — builds with a natural sense of small grievances giving way to real connection. Things get steamy more quickly than she expects, and she becomes pregnant during one of their lunch-hour trysts, only to have her entire world turned upside down by David’s sudden death.
All this happens in about 15 minutes of screentime, but the extreme reversals of fortune work thanks to of Manon Clavel’s subtle performance as Kika, whose gigantic childlike eyes take in the whole universe while a hardened exterior belies her essential vulnerability, as well as Poukine’s attention to the humanity on the margins of the story. For much of its runtime, Kika feels like it could spiral out in any direction, but while Poukine will often steal a glance at another person — like holding on an old man leaving the red-light hotel Kika and David had their affair in — she always returns her gaze back to Kika’s environment and travails. Poukine has great instincts for character and place.
But she does not have great instincts for narrative time — at least not yet. The liberties she takes by employing ellipses to add fuel to the story’s forward progression can lead to striking juxtapositions, like when Kika talks about getting a second job and then in the span of a single cut works the fish market at a grocery store, but largely they lead to enormous confusion about the macro problems Kika is dealing with. It’s unclear from the outset, for example, how long she had been with David before he died, or how much time passes between his death and the major upheavals in her life that arise as a result. We’re often left to wonder whether Kika’s journey is happening over the course of days, weeks, or months. Moment-to-moment, though, Poukine establishes believable verisimilitude as Kika succumbs to financial pressures resulting from her loss.
Taking a cue from that other giant of Belgian filmmaking, Chantal Akerman, Poukine pushes Kika toward sex work to make ends meet. Inspired by a client she meets at the beginning of the movie who sells her dirty underwear to pay the rent, Kika slowly — Or quickly? Who’s to say? — submerges herself in the world of BDSM. What follows is a prismatic look at dominatrix as vocation, touching on its many indignities, annoyances, and pleasures; the community one can find within it; and the psychological component of the gig — how it affects the mind, and what a person can and can’t handle once she gets the hang of it. In other words, it’s treated as a job like any other. The framework is useful because it can be applied to any work environment, and because it can be applied to any work environment it’s a better critique of the system that would push someone like Kika to the edge than finger-wagging and pedantry would be. Backed into a corner and in over her head, Kika’s in a desperate position necessitated by fiscal circumstance. We can fill in the blanks.
All the particulars are well and good — and then it comes time to pay the past due bill that comes with skirting huge chunks of Kika’s story. Toward the end of the film, and again inspired by a client (whatever happened to work-life balance?), Kika decides to take a beating by a BDSM colleague in an attempt to regain control of her pain. It’s rightfully upsetting, but since Poukine largely left the map of Kika’s emotional arc undrawn, we only understand it’s the climax of the movie because of the scene’s proximity to the closing credits: it’s out of touch with the more delicate timbre of the rest of the film. Inevitable, perhaps, but also conspicuously insincere.
She may pratfall as the movie draws to a close, but Poukine still thankfully dodges the quicksand of misery porn for the most part. Yes, Kika occasionally spills into the self-consciously artful (rooms are often depicted in one bold uniform color) and the narrative rhythm is wonky, yet the debut-movie placenta smell is sufficiently offset by the warmth emanating from its core. Kika has problems, but it nevertheless suggests it was made by a filmmaker worth paying considerable attention to going forward.
Published as part of New Directors/New Films 2026 — Dispatch 1.
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