The Catcher Review

“The government is afraid of what they cannot see.” – Robin Dubois

Being offered the opportunity to take a look at The Catcher was a treat I wasn’t going to pass up. Following my association with the Hollyshorts Film Festival this past summer, I’m getting to see some amazing films that show the incredible wealth of upcoming talent that’s out there making their way up the ladder, and Flemish writer/director Luka Galle is one of them.

The Catcher is his second short feature, and has already amassed an outstanding 11 awards on the international festival circuit. At the time of writing, The Catcher is OSCAR qualified for the 2027 awards.

The main protagonist is Robin Dubois (Emil Leysen), a loner employed by the government to trap and exterminate birds. But the birds are invisible. Given the theme we’re introduced to here, the premise although unusual, works very well. Robin is a solitary soul, who himself feels invisible and begins to empathise with the birds he’s catching. One of these birds brings him a companionship he wasn’t expecting, so he spares its life rather than killing it and submitting the footage of its dead body to his supervisor. (The birds become visible only when they’re dead.)

On meeting him for the first time, despite his being in the job for two years, even his stern supervisor tells Robin; “I don’t trust loners, they’re so incomprehensible”. This indicates her herd mentality. Her trust in the notion that everyone should go with the flow.

It’s possible here to equate invisibility as a metaphor for freedom, nonconformity and the freedom to move outside the system. To go through life unseen and therefore unjudged.

It’s a powerful message, deftly delivered in a film that on the surface is quirky, surreal but extremely effective in its execution. In watching it, the viewer quickly discards the absurd notion of catching invisible birds and embraces the concept of invisibility as initially a metaphor for loneliness, which becomes instead a means of unshackling.

Ultimately, only the dead are visible.

Luka Galle is, I understand now working on developing The Catcher as a feature film. That’s one I’d like to see. In the meantime, I wish him every success at the Academy Awards.

Rob Rating = 8