In the “Random Film of the Day” slot for October 9, 2026, Ex Drummer came up — a Belgian black comedy about a rock band. The idea that grabs you right from the poster sounds like a ready-made joke: three musicians with disabilities are looking for a drummer and invite a famous writer. All three have physical defects, while the fourth has one of his own: he cannot play the drums. The writer’s name is Dries, and his real interest is not music but material for a new novel.
The second coincidence no longer looked accidental. The novel from which the film grew was written by Herman Brusselmans, who was born on October 9, 1957 — the exact day the film caught my eye. All that remained was to find out what kind of picture this was, the one that caused a scandal in Flanders, and why it is still remembered.
The story takes place in Ostend, a port city on the Belgian coast — or rather, on its underside. The trio of would-be band members looks like a study in contrasts: singer Koen is a lisping, misogynistic skinhead who spends his free time smearing blood across the walls of his apartment.
Guitarist Ivan is deaf, unemployed, hooked on drugs, and beats his wife. The third member, Jan, is gay, and one of his arms will not bend; the reason, as the film hints, is familial and disgusting.
They call the band The Feminists. The logic is this: four “cripples” — like a group of feminists, just as useless. Their rivals are a band named after the real Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, whose frontman goes by Dikke Lul, “Fat Dick.” The Feminists’ short set list includes a cover of Devo’s “Mongoloid” — the title was not chosen by oversight.
Dries agrees to become their drummer and almost immediately spells out his goal. In his own words, he wants to worm his way into the lives of losers and descend to the bottom of stupidity and ugliness. The band is his field of observation, its members his material. The rest of the film is about how he works that material over.
Before Ex Drummer, director Koen Mortier had never made a feature film — he earned his living shooting commercials and pop videos. He carried his debut around for a long time: according to the Dutch publication Filmkrant, Mortier scraped together the budget for eight years. The money that finally turned up was not “big,” and the critic says it outright: what carried the film was not financing, but directorial imagination.
The title sequence is built as a showcase for that imagination. The credits run backward: the characters ride bicycles while the crew’s names appear on cars, road signs, and discarded magazines they pass. The scene ends with an upside-down shot — singer Koen is standing on the ceiling of his apartment, and the English press compared him to a bat in a cave. The device runs through the entire film: one of the characters literally lives on the ceiling, upside down, and why is never explained even once.
The novel Ex-drummer was published in 1994 and was the third in the author’s “Ex-” series: before it, Brusselmans had released Ex-schrijver (“Ex-Writer,” 1991) and Ex-minnaar (“Ex-Lover,” 1993). The film’s title is not about a drummer who quit; it is part of a series about people whose role has run its course.
Brusselmans is the “monster” of Flemish literature, one of its bestselling and most scandalous authors at once. His subjects are alcohol, sex, boredom. He bases his characters on living people, and has ended up in court more than once because of it. According to Filmkrant, he modeled Dries on himself. In the book, the writer is a charming man visited at home by his beautiful girlfriend and the daughter of the minister of hygiene, and the critic snidely observes: naturally, the author did not pass up the chance to elevate himself into a physically attractive protagonist.
This is also where the main split in interpretation lies. The international press read the film as a story about “the dregs of Ostend” and “misogynistic psychopaths” — a view from above, from a theater box. A Dutch critic saw something else: morality simply is not the subject of the film at all. The characters commit neither good deeds nor bad ones, while the Nietzschean question of who invented ruling morality hangs unanswered at the end. The two readings of the same picture are much farther apart than the difference between reviews.
There is a separate joke in the fact that The Feminists’ music was performed not by an assortment of cripples but by the real Flemish band Millionaire, while the rival band’s song was sung by the actual singer Flip Kowlier. The actors were not random either: Norman Baert (singer Koen) was the son of cinema managers, and spent his whole life acting in theater and TV series; Sam Louwyck (the deaf guitarist) trained as a dancer and choreographer, and a few years later would appear in Bullhead; Dries Vanhegen, who played the namesake Dries, was a theater actor and playwright, also born in Ostend. In other words, all four men’s “disability” on set existed only in the script.
The scandal began before the premiere. Ghent art-house cinema Studio Skoop refused to screen the film, citing graphic violence, a rape scene, and self-mutilation; the press also whispered about crude references to the late King Baudouin. Producer Euridice Gysel called the cinema’s explanation “absurd”: supposedly, they had suddenly become afraid of reactions. The Kinepolis chain did screen the picture, but not in French-speaking theaters and not in small towns, while the distributor released it cautiously — on nine screens in Flanders, with plans to expand “if it caught on.”
The English press, however, put the film in a different company: Screen Daily called it the most controversial Belgian film since Man Bites Dog, while the Guardian listed its shelf-mates — Irréversible, A Clockwork Orange, that same Man Bites Dog, and This Is Spinal Tap. The scores remained low, though: Metacritic gave it 36 out of 100 based on four reviews, Rotten Tomatoes 44% from eighteen.
The point where the sources openly diverge is the release dates and runtime. The premiere took place in Rotterdam in January 2007, the Belgian theatrical run began on January 31, while English Wikipedia gives November 7, 2007 as the release date, and what accounts for those two months is never explained. The runtime shifts too: 90 minutes in one reference work, 101 in the business press, 104 in a review. There simply is no single figure.
The film itself encountered the same split as its characters: some looked down on it and found no idea there, others dismissed it as posturing — while viewers gradually turned the picture into a cult film. In 2025, Czar released a separate film about its making, which in itself says something for a debut nearly twenty years old.
The film’s ending is an explosion Dries has been steering toward consciously from the very beginning: he manipulates the band until its members are ready to tear one another apart, and the only future ahead is described by a single line from a punk song: “No Future.” That is the answer to the question posed by the hook. Ex Drummer is not a film about music or disability, but about how a person comes to the weak in order to use them.
The cripple here is the fourth one, the very man whose defect is not in his body, but in place of it. Rating the film on a scale from “shock for shock’s sake” to “immoral masterpiece” is pointless: both things were said about it at once, and both sincerely.