Rousted from his underground bunker by a policeman, a hunter, and a village priest, vagrant Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet, THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN) wanders into suburbia in search of a bath. When he attempts to con his way into the home of TV executive Richard (Jeroen Perceval, BULLHEAD) by feigning a past acquaintance with his high-strung artist wife Marina (Hadewych Minis, LOFT), he ends up soundly thrashed and left bleeding on the lawn. The seemingly clumsy con, however, succeeds in etching the beginnings of a wedge between the couple as Richard starts to doubt what he knows about Marina's past and Marina is horrified by Richard's brutality. When she later discovers Borgman hiding in her tool shed, she lets him take a bath in the house and recuperate in the summer house under the condition that he stay out of sight of her husband and three children (Marina already having sworn au pair Stine [Sara Hjort Ditlevsen] to secrecy). To Marina's unease, Borgman enters and exits the house at will, tells fairy stories to the children - who think he is a magician - and expresses a desire to eat with her "at the big table". When he prepares to leave out of boredom, Marina finds that she wants to play his game without knowing exactly what it is. Borgman subsequently reveals a more sinister intent - to the audience - as he and his network of "agents" set about casually eliminating and assuming the identities of people necessary for their insidious infiltration of the household, marking the family members possibly for death or something else.

A dark twist on BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING, the titular BORGMAN and his crew may be extraordinarily ruthless and ruthlessly efficient psychopaths (it becomes apparent that material gain is not their goal so we can't exactly call them con artists) or literal demons in human form (what with their animal familiars, ability to incite dreams, and marking victims). Director Alex van Warmerdam does not seem particularly interested in one interpretation or another so much as maintaining a sense of dread amidst the turns of his unpredictable scenario which seems more deliberate in pacing than in plotting. At best, it can be seen as the unraveling of a family that embodies the worst traits of the complacent classes. Marina refuses Stine's request to have her boyfriend as a guest since she wants to know who comes under her roof, entertains violently masochistic fantasies, and does not seem to object to child labor so long as their efforts are appreciated (like the stuffed animal she gives her daughter). Besides Richard's violence, we are also given a demonstration of his racism as Borgman and company set up several black and immigrant applicants for the position of gardener in order to make Borgman himself seem all the more suitable. When Borgman in the role of the family gardener rebuffs Marina's advances because he cannot sleep with his employer's wife, Marina consents to whatever needs to be done to rectify this (as she had implicitly consented to whatever Borgman needed to do to return to the house in another capacity). The divisions are not so much good and evil as evil and degrees of complicity.