Almost a financial thriller, Dust unspools the quiet implosion of two self-fashioned tech visionaries, turning corporate bravado into a slow, absurd reckoning with ego, fraud and the illusion of success.
Here in the film Dust, part of the 76th Berlinale’s competition, directed by Anke Blonde, a Belgian casting director who made her directing debut in 1998 with the short film Meneer Frits and later her feature debut The Best of Dorien B. (2019), which premiered at IFFR, she brings us a film about two men in pristine suits gliding through glass corridors and banquet halls, side by side, like they own the century. But it is a prelude to what’s to happen, as Anke opens her film with their empire about to implode. Instead of the swaggering drumbeat you’d expect for tech kings in 1999, the film drowns them in heavy strings and a quiet dread, framing financial fraud not as high-octane spectacle but as something absurd, almost abstract, unfolding inside fragile egos that helped build the late-capitalist mirage.
Anchored by Angelo Tijssens’ sharp, sly script and the lived-in performances of Jan Hammenecker and Arieh Worthalter, Dust works best when it moves like a seduction: restrained surface, outlandish undercurrent, a constant sense that the ground is about to slip.
Luc, the soft-around-the-edges tech brain, scrambles home to his wife to hide cash and evidence, while Geert, the immaculate salesman with the indoor pool, stages his own fall with a kind of wounded elegance, the two trajectories mirroring and mocking each other as the Monday-morning arrest looms.
Just when we think we have mapped them, Anke drags us into the literal mud of the Flemish countryside, where the film trades boardrooms for clay and leaves its characters — and us — stuck in consequences that no longer look sleek at all.
Dust is a curious hybrid: a grand, almost classical drama that keeps puncturing itself with deadpan humour, like the recurring gag where Geert’s voice-activated office system refuses to recognize his name, an oddly perfect joke for a story about men who thought their signatures could bend reality.
The film’s technical craft is quite worthy of writing about. Frank van den Eeden’s cinematography presses bodies into frames that feel both luxurious and airless.
Call it a financial thriller, Dust keeps nudging us toward a discomforting truth: the distance between “villain” and “decent guy who made it” is wafer-thin, and sometimes the man with muddy shoes and a balding crown is the closest thing we have to a hero, or at least a mirror we can’t quite look away from.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
