Penny's Shadow

The Weight of the Reins

There is a particular kind of cinematic shorthand reserved for the bond between a teenager and a dangerous horse. It usually involves soft focus, an acoustic guitar, and a lot of whispered promises in a dusty stable. latestnetflix.com's take is that i admit, I sat down for Steven de Jong’s Penny’s Shadow expecting exactly that kind of sugary, low-stakes comfort food.

What I found instead was a surprisingly observant little film about grief, wrapped in the familiar packaging of a Dutch family adventure. It does not rewrite the rules of the genre. Yet it takes those rules seriously enough to find the human pulse beating underneath them.

De Jong sets the story on Ameland, an island that feels appropriately isolated from the noise of the mainland. Lisa (Liza Sips) arrives for a summer holiday with her family, only to become fixated on Shadow, a deeply traumatized black stallion. The horse is entirely unrideable, mostly because he is carrying the emotional baggage of his teenage owner, Kai (Levi van Kempen).