A columnist (Katja Herbers) takes revenge on her Twitter trolls in the 2019 Dutch dark comedy they should have called Doom Scroll.

Ivo van Aart keeps the satire straight and the kills domestic, though the direction never reaches the dizzying heights of Prevenge or Promising Young Woman. Herbers even looks a bit like Carey Mulligan, and is nail-bitingly believable as the keyboard worrier-turned-warrior at the eye of a Twitter storm. Even her most Adrien Chiles-like articles (‘I Don’t Like Soup’) attract reply guys telling her to stay in her lane, be in prison, contract AIDS, the usual stuff. After being stonewalled by police (“It’s just the internet, it isn’t real”), she crosses the line from mass media to mass murderer.

Choosing a professional and having them kill their detractors is a fairly easy way of making a satirical slasher, but The Columnist goes beyond feminist revenge fantasy to explore timely issues of free speech, online polarisation and social media’s corrosive effect on our collective humanity. Not content to merely swipe at right-wing trolls, the film also takes aim at liberal hypocrisy. Not unlike the censorious progressives of 1995 black comedy The Last Supper, the eponymous columnist kills people for their views despite making a career from spouting hers. What a hack.