!['The Dutchman' Review: André Holland & Kate Mara Lead Andre Gaines’ Fascinating, But Flawed Adaptation Of Amiri Baraka’s Play [SXSW]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/09094619/The-Dutchman-Kate-Mara-Andre-Holand.jpg "'The Dutchman' Review: André Holland & Kate Mara Lead Andre Gaines’ Fascinating, But Flawed Adaptation Of Amiri Baraka’s Play [SXSW]")
Some stories don’t age; they mutate. They get sharper, meaner, more immediate, like the culture keeps feeding them fresh oxygen. That’s the charge running through “The Dutchman,” André Gaines’ modern adaptation of the award-winning play of the same name, which debuted earlier this year as a World Premiere Narrative Feature at the SXSW Film Festival and now arrives and we have two exclusive clips to premiere that underline the film’s uneasy cocktail of race, desire, dread, and dark fantasy.
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Gaines wrote, directed, and produced “The Dutchman,” and the project marked his second feature after the documentary “The One And Only Dick Gregory.” He’s also worked across film and TV, including serving as an executive producer on Spike Lee’s “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.”
The cast is stacked: André Holland (“The Knick”) stars as Clay, with Kate Mara, Zazie Beetz, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Aldis Hodge rounding out the ensemble. And if the premise is built like a psychological thriller, the themes are the real fuse: a modern story about Black and white race relations that doesn’t politely “examine” the subject so much as detonate it, then let the fallout drift into surreal, ominous territory.
Clay is a successful but troubled Black businessman trying to salvage his marriage through therapy sessions with his wife, Kaya. But their therapist isn’t what he seems, and he begins appearing in Clay’s life outside their appointments, warping the boundaries between treatment and haunting. Then, on a New York subway train, Clay meets Lula, a seductive but sinister white stranger whose presence starts to unravel him thread by thread. Clay has to figure out what’s actually happening — and what’s being done to him — if he wants to get back to his wife, heal what’s fractured inside him, and survive the night.
In a modern adaptation of the 1964 Obie Award-winning play, “The Dutchman” isn’t exactly subtle material, and it isn’t supposed to be. It’s the kind of story designed to make audiences argue in the lobby, then think about it for days afterward, especially once the film’s darker, more fantastical elements begin to seep into what initially reads as realism.
