In The Dutchman, we meet Clay (André Holland) and, like his name, he is amenable and moldable. His wife, Kaya (Zazie Beetz), has cheated on him, and she’s barely making an effort in therapy. Still, he goes along with it even though it’s unclear to him (and to us) whether he really wants to be there or with her. His therapist, Dr. Amiri (Stephen McKinley Henderson), doesn’t even seem all that invested in the couple’s relationship.
Instead, Amiri, who shares a name with the author of the play this film is based on, seems hyper-focused on Clay as he’s stuck between two lives — one of the outwardly proper kind where he rides the subway home in his business suit and hosts a fundraiser for his friend running a political campaign in Harlem. The other is the life that Lula (Kate Mara), a woman Clay meets on the subway, ᴀssumes he is hiding beneath his placid exterior.
The Dutchman Is An Unnerving Thriller
It Is An Adaptation & Metatextual Examination Of The Original Play
The Dutchman is based on the 1964 play of the same name by Amiri Baraka, though like the therapist taking the namesake of its author, it takes a metatextual perspective on its source material. In a way, the play itself is a character in the film, the therapist an author. Clay is the unwitting subject, and it’s unclear how much agency he has in the situation that’s presented to him. And it’s a pretty awful one.
The Dutchman struggles to find a balance between its strangeness and the more grounded human drama.
Lula sits next to Clay on the subway and immediately begins taunting him, flirtatiously touching his leg and his chest, revealing that she already knows quite a bit about him. She’s almost like an apparition, the ideal temptress, with striking red hair, red lipstick, and red nails. She even pulls a ruby red apple out of her bag, carving it with a knife before seductively eating it while Clay watches. When these tactics don’t work on Clay, who is really trying to just mind his business, Lula begins operating on a much more sinister register.
She mocks Clay’s Blackness. She weaponizes her white womanhood to gain the upper hand in public and private. She seduces him and then screams at the top of her lungs when he tries to leave her apartment, refusing to let her accompany him to a party. It’s her word against his, she says. Once Lula is at the party, she slings microaggressions around Clay’s friends and openly flaunts her closeness with Clay in front of Kaya. It’s all very clearly a test, but to what end remains unclear.
I found that imbalance to be helpful in understanding Clay’s headspace, but a few reveals make it so that the logic of the film’s world remains fuzzied even if what it’s trying to say isn’t.
There’s an explicitly surreal element to The Dutchman, making it feel as if Clay is fighting for his life in some sort of limbo world where the odds are clearly stacked against him. Director Andre Gaines effectively makes this New York feel as if it’s almost frozen in time, cyclical like the subway Lula and Clay meet on. The music, by Daniel Hart, is similarly unsettling.
Ultimately, though, The Dutchman struggles to find a balance between its strangeness and the more grounded human drama. Clay’s conflict with Kaya results in a confrontation at their friend’s party. It’s one of the strongest scenes of the film, with Beetz and Holland giving their characters the proper heft they deserve, but it feels outside of everything else that is happening. Ultimately, I found that imbalance to be helpful in understanding Clay’s headspace, but a few reveals make it so the logic of the film’s world remains fuzzy even if what it’s trying to say isn’t.
The original play was an examination of race relations at the time it was written. 2025’s The Dutchman is suitably updated to examine the ways in which Black men are treated today, with Lula’s threats only one of many Clay faces in New York City. He is stopped for no reason by police officers as he enters the train station; his guilt is ᴀssumed no matter the facts of a situation.
By the end of The Dutchman, we return to the subway where Lula and Clay first met, and the pair are once again sitting together on the train. This cycle of psychological violence won’t seem to end for Clay. If Lula is every insidious aspect of society made manifest, how does Clay even begin to stop her? The film has a clever way of answering that, diverting from its source material at key moments to ensure different outcomes.
It all goes back to Dr. Amiri, the film’s puppet master. As a meta take on the source material, The Dutchman is interesting, though it didn’t need to heighten the surreality of the situation further to make an impact. We live in a surreal world and what happens in the film is not that far off from what happens in reality. With Holland and Mara, the commitment to The Dutchman is apparent and though its ending feels as if things are wrapped up a bit too cleanly, the film succeeds in being an unnerving odyssey over one New York night.
The Dutchman premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
