Godforsaken

Two small-town Dutch boys have such a close socially unnatural friendship that they care nothing for human or divine rules and lose all grip on reality, sliding into violent crime. Stan Meijer is by nature a good boy, but grows up frustrated in Venlo, a boring provincial town in the Catholic Dutch South, feeling neglected by his gold-digger mother who remarried a dentist and abandoned by his biological father, a friendly macho trucker who stood the pre-teen up for reasons unknown when he planned to move in with him, never to be heard off until reading his dad's obituary. So instead of joining the minor socialite life, Stan hooks up with junkies Maikel (dialect pronunciation-spelling for Michael) Verheije, a hot-head small criminal, and Sef, his lieutenant, who drag him along in small crime as an adolescent. When the bumbling trio gets arrested red-handed, the police sends both ruffians to jail but releases Stan as implausible suspect. He's too nice to accept when Maikel's girl-friend offers herself to him, and on Maikel's release joins him in a hold-up which goes bad, as the nervous amateurs needlessly kill the victim, a shopkeeper and secret weed-grower, rather than extort his illegal money as planned. The trio fears his Turkish crime boss Osman's gang will come after them, but instead are recruited as sort of a death squad in a gang war they don't even care to learn the nature of... —KGF Vissers