‘September Afternoon’ Locarno Review: A Beach Day Stretched to Collapse

Nicolaas Schmidt’s experimental cinema has a set of very specific coordinates. Many of his films are built around repetition, banality and the texture of everyday experience. Most of them also sustain an unusual relationship with music: Schmidt frequently uses or samples well-known songs—there’s even a short that could pass as an offbeat video for a famous Crowded House track—and folds them into these observational portraits. The result is a strange yet oddly familiar assemblage, as if he were recreating the perceptual flow of someone walking or travelling with headphones on, half-absorbed in a pop song and half in the world around them.

With September Afternoon, the director of First Time—his award-winning mid-length film that essentially tracked a train journey in real time—pushes things a bit further and takes slightly greater risks. The film observes a windy, difficult day that a family attempts to spend at the beach. Like First Time, it opens with what looks like an ’80s-style commercial montage of all the fun, carefree things that are supposed to happen at the seaside—at least according to advertising. Reality, however, proves considerably greyer, especially in September, as the summer fades out.

Once Schmidt introduces his central trio—father, mother and daughter—the film settles into a structure based on apparently inconsequential moments: the family’s preparations to go to the beach. Bags are packed, food baskets assembled, umbrellas gathered. When they step outside, the sky is overcast, but these stubborn beachgoers refuse to concede to the weather. They struggle to plant an umbrella against the wind, try to walk without freezing, and endure a series of modest mishaps that Schmidt presents in what feels like real time.

Running underneath, almost like a whisper, is a persistent musical loop reminiscent of the intro to Eyes Without a Face by Billy Idol, sampled into near infinity. That repetitive rhythm lends the otherwise tedious but recognisable chain of seaside inconveniences a faintly comic, slightly absurd tone. As the film progresses, though, the problems escalate. The characters are forced to make key decisions and confront unexpected, potentially catastrophic situations—all without dialogue, as is typical in Schmidt’s work.

Within its singular framework, September Afternoon works effectively, at times evoking the physical humour of silent-era comedians—especially Buster Keaton—through the friction between bodies and environment. But by the third act, new elements shift the film away from everyday banality toward something heavier and more troubling. Schmidt subtly recalibrates his approach, edging into a more intimate register of the characters’ inner states.

“The film uses ‘dead time’ as raw material,” the director notes in the production materials. “I stretch mundane moments until they collapse in their emptiness. In an age of arbitrary extraordinariness, plain banality is stimulating as fuck.” September Afternoon, much like his previous films, effectively validates that premise—turning the simple act of digging a hole in the sand or walking along a beach into something that feels almost life-or-death. Sometimes even more so than when things genuinely spiral out of control.