You might think, before watching Bullhead, the Oscar-nominated debut from Belgian writer/director Michaël R. Roskam, that a film about black market trade in illegal bovine growth hormones in the rural cattle-raising borderlands between the French and Dutch sections of Belgium might not present the most interesting prospect. You’ll probably leave thinking much the same thing, but there are multiple stories — probably too many — at work in this film, with that one just being the clumsiest.

At the center of all these stories is Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts), a 30ish cattle farmer who has inherited the family business from his mostly incapacitated father, as well as shady business practices going back at least as far as his own childhood. Flashbacks show Jacky and his best friend Diederik (Jeroen Perceval) on business visits with his father to the supplier of hormones, and learning how to inject the cows before he’s even hit puberty.

Those visits and that knowledge have two major impacts on Jacky’s adult life. One we find out about in the present, as we see Jacky injecting himself with hormones and popping pills, a ritual he follows by shadowboxing as he feels the new virility coursing through his veins, and which explains his intimidatingly sculpted physique and tendency to rage. Both of which are handy qualities to have when you’re threatening locals into only doing business with you.

The other event takes place in one of those flashbacks. He has a crush on Lucia, the daughter of the hormone supplier, but her cruel, slightly mentally handicapped brother Bruno develops a violent reaction to the young Jacky’s shy affections, and when Jacky and Diederik see him in a compromising position, he uses it as an excuse to commit an act of violence against Jacky that, while never displayed onscreen, is awful to witness. In that act of violence lies the key to both Jacky’s seemingly dual personality as an adult: shy and melancholy at times, an incredible hulk of testosterone-addled masculinity at others.

Bullhead is strongest as a character study of this man. As played by Schoenaerts, he is a human block of granite, chipped from the side of a mountain, but with an odd depth of emotion behind his rough, often expressionless face. There’s a mountain of secrets behind his persona, but in trying to reveal who this character is, Roskam often finds him just as inscrutable as the rest of the characters in the movie.

That seems to be the main rationale for the hydra-headed storyline, as Roskam finds it necessary to throw a diverse an array of situations at Jacky as possible, in the hopes that the depths of his character will be revealed in the aggregation of his reactions. There’s something to that theory, but the complexity of the character comes at the expense of narrative focus. There’s the murder of a cop to deal with, an unexpected reunion with Diederik, the resurgence of his crush on Lucia, dirty dealings with hormone-shilling vets and Flemish beef traders, as well as a completley out of place blackly comic subplot involving two bumbling Walloon mechanics. Those two seem to be intended as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, but Roskam’s reach slighly exceeds his grasp in that goal, and they mostly join the clutter of plot threads that make the film more tedious than seems necessary.

Still, Roskam has style to spare, and there is a gorgeously dark, meditative film here buried beneath the excess. Similarly, Schoenaerts is as eye-opening a psychological presence onscreen as he is a physical one, and when the film is focused squarely on him, avoiding other distractions, it shows off it’s true potential. There’s a lean, tough, streamlined film to be found here; the main problem is that Bullhead, just like its protagonist, is artificially bulked up until what’s underneath is barely visible.

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Bullhead
Written and Directed by Michael R. Roskam
Starring Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeroen Perceval, Jeanne Dandoy
Running time: 124 minutes
Rated R for some strong violence, language and sexual content.
Opens today at West End Cinema.