Daan Bunnik | Headbutt / 2017

the change

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daan Bunnik (screenwriter and director) Headbutt / 2017 [10 minutes]

 

Something has happened in the close relationship between the two brothers at the center of this short Dutch film from 2017. The younger brother Tobias (Felix Osinga), age 15, seems to no longer exist for this now always moody and basically unhappy older brother Lucas (Nils Verkooijen), age 18.

    The internet games they have long played together frustrates him. Even playing catch with a small football in their room, obviously a regular activity, seems of little interest to Lucas. Instead he plays alone, tossing the ball up and catching it for long periods of time in silent contemplation. Lucas has even seemingly abandoned one of the former favorite mutual challenges to “break the record,” a game which they stare down one another at close range until one of them blinks or turns away and then count down the moment until they butt heads, sharing their mutual pain.

    Tobias occasionally visits his magazine of female beauties to masturbate, but is now basically left alone, while obviously something is deeply eating at his brother. He watches him sitting on their balcony, hanging his body over the ledge of the high rise railing and fears for the worst; might he even kill himself? What could be ailing him? Why the sudden change in their deep love?

     One night he even attempts to enter his brother’s bed, as he probably has often in the past, to curl up to him and offer his bodily sympathy, but Lucas immediately pushes him away. At another point when they momentarily do play catch, Tobias accidently hits his brother’s lava lamp, evidently a prize possession, which his brother angrily throws at him.

     We are never told what is going on in Lucas’ head; and in some respects, not knowing him as well as Tobias does, we have even less evidence for any postulations that might explain his behavior than does Tobias.

     Except as older individuals, we do comprehend that not only is Lucas undergoing a vast hormonal change at the age when teenagers experience wide shifts in emotional responses, but since it seems to be a little later than the usual age of 16 or 17 that it is likely not just standard issues of sexuality. We can only suspect that it’s probably has nothing to do with a girlfriend since there is no mention of love or even a temporary infatuation, no frustration over a breakup.

     In particular, since Tobias fantasizes that Lucas may even commit suicide, dropping from his high perch to the street below, we wonder whether it might be a far deeper matter, possibly having to do with his perception that he may be simply different from the others of his age, gay or bisexual, or even trans. If nothing else, Tobias is experiencing what all close younger brothers must, the change in their relationship as the other attempts to discover himself apart from family love.

     Realizing finally that Tobias has become frightened for his survival, Lucas finally agrees to play their old favorite, “break the record,” counting down the moment when they will butt each other in the forehead producing a kind of mutual release of their fears and frustrations. The film ends before they make full contact, but we know at least they have momentarily come together again in a symbolic form of bodily communication if not an intellectual sharing of his problems.

    The brotherly love Tobias offers him, in fact, may truly be one of the things that helps Lucas to survive in the cruel world he is facing.

      I remember that a couple of years before Lucas’ age, I too began needing time to be alone, to suffer my own unspoken and even unrecognized fears, moving out of the bunkbeds I shared with my brother and into a basement cot, where hanging fruit shelves served as a place for my personal library under which I placed a desk. We had a shower in the basement as well. So I could come and go without having to offer any explanation to a curious brother or a sister down the hall, or even to my worried parents. It was not until a year or two later, in college, that I finally resolved what was troubling me, coming out to myself and soon after engaging in male sexual encounters.

 

Los Angeles, January 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).