Sylvia, despite her bravado and cunning ability to lie to police and the girls who entrust her with their lives, is Ingmar’s ultimate victim. Upon arrival, the reality is being homed in hotels and trailer parks while working long hours having sex with strangers to line Ingmar’s pockets, in the end. Ingmar and Sylvia have a murky but long-running system in place to attract young women who are deprived of job opportunities and economic prosperity in their own countries to ‘bar jobs’. The real money is in trading young girls and women from Eastern Europe – mostly Bulgaria and Romania – who become enslaved to the business due to their lack of legal status in the country. Though sex work is legal in Belgium, soliciting and pimping are not. Police investigator Evi, battling alcoholism and the grief of her motherless childhood, makes up the trifecta of flawed, clever, resilient women in Red Light. Sylvia and Esther become unwittingly involved in one another’s lives, connected by what they know – and don’t know – about Esther’s husband. Despite being the owner in paperwork and title, it is Sylvia’s brutish and manipulative boyfriend Ingmar who evidently pulls the strings. Here, Sylvia is the owner of a popular sex club/bar, though even this is not as it appears.
In trying to understand what led to his disappearance, she traces his last known sighting to Antwerp’s notorious Red Light district. The premise is that opera singer Esther’s husband disappears while seemingly on a business trip. Don’t let that put you off though, for Sylvia is compelling and the script is clever and layered. As Red Light progresses, the old trope of the “hooker with a heart of gold” that has infiltrated popular fiction and drama for generations is inescapable.
Sylvia, with her brittle peroxide-blonde hair, pin-thin body and bristling, nervous energy, is a far cry from the priestess Melisandre in GoT. Many Game of Thrones (GoT) fanatics will watch this show to see Carice Van Houten, and she is transformed and entirely convincing as Antwerp brothel owner Sylvia. It won’t surprise anyone that crime thrives, ultimately, as a consequence of ingrained social and political inequities, racism and misogyny. Like so many recent European dramas taking deep-dives into the murky moral grey zones of lives behind news headlines – such as Follow the Money and Bad Banks – Red Light does not seek to present crimes as forgivable because of the sympathetic stories of protagonists, but to probe their motivations and, ultimately, to expose the roots of where injustice begins. In Red Light, women are both victims and perpetrators of crimes against other women and youth, but their own suffering and desperation is the motivation, so despite the inability to fully sympathise with any of them, it is also impossible to despise them. Sylvia (Carice van Houten) and Ingmar (Geert Van Rampelberg) in ‘Red Light’.