‘Met Mes’ is a meta and acid portrait of vanity and the consequences of our actions. Sam de Jong creates an over the top, materialistic and colorful universe where every human relation is questioned by their values.

The film follows a TV presenter named Eveline (Hadewych Minis) who quits her job in order to be taken seriously as a filmmaker. She gets a camera and decides to shoot a documentary about their community, but everything changes when Yousef (Shahine El-Hamus) and his friend steals her camera. In order to receive money from the insurance company, she lies to the policy saying Yousef threatened her with a knife. When Yousef goes to jail because of her lie, she starts questioning everything around her.

The colorful and over the top cinematography help to set the materialistic and artificial world that surrounds the characters. Everyone dresses and behaves the same way, as if they’re following a pattern to fit socially. The metalinguistic approach of the film questions the morality of everyone involved, from the characters to the director himself. When questioning why people only have values when they are objectified, does it not fit for the actors who creates their characters in order to be part of a film? Is fitting into a character any different from fitting into a social group? The director doesn’t have any easy answers for that.

Sam de Jong’s direction navigates between those themes with a unique narrative. As heavy a hand as it is, the direction of the film puts us in the place of the interviewer and the interviewee, playing with the questions that makes humanity complex. Without being preachy, the director shows how hypocritical and unfair society can be when it comes to our own selfishness.

As Eveline says, her documentary is “an anatomical investigation into the consequences of a lie”, and if we look into that, Jong may say his film is a study on the human capacity to adapt to a materialistic and artificial world while we seek for reason to our own existence.