What Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) is about
Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) opens on a relationship that feels lived-in, comfortable — the kind where two people have their own shorthand, their own rhythms. Maya is 23, Mattias is 26, and the film's early moments suggest a closeness that doesn't need to announce itself. Then Mattias loses his mother. Suddenly. And the film — written and directed by Tessa Kortmulder — becomes something more unsettling than a grief story. It becomes a portrait of the person standing just outside that grief, watching someone she loves slowly become unreachable. Maya doesn't lose Mattias to another person or a dramatic rupture. She loses him to something she can't compete with, can't argue against, and can't fix. That's the film's quiet devastation: the recognition that love doesn't always fail loudly. Sometimes it just changes shape until you don't recognize it anymore.
How Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) came together
Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) is a 2026 Dutch short fiction drama produced by GROM Productions, with backing from the Netherlands Film Fund's Wildcard scheme — a grant specifically designed to support emerging filmmakers making their first or early-career short fiction work. According to Tessa Kortmulder's own project page, the film represents a deeply personal creative undertaking, the kind of project the Wildcard scheme exists to protect and encourage. Kortmulder wrote and directed the piece, and the production assembled a focused crew: Rollo van Wijk as director of photography, Nina Graafland as editor, and Zita Leemans handling sound design — a lean team for a lean film, which at 17 minutes doesn't waste a single one of them.
The cast is anchored by Bente Kruger as Maya and Toto van Stekelenburg as Mattias. Neither performance is showy. That's the point. Kruger in particular carries enormous weight in the film's quieter passages — the scenes where Maya is simply watching, waiting, recalibrating. It's the kind of acting that only registers fully in retrospect, when you realize how much she communicated without dialogue.
The film screened at the Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen 2026, placed within a thematic programming block focused on relationships and family — a curatorial choice that says something about how the festival read the film. It's also been highlighted by SEE NL as part of recent Dutch festival fare. No major aggregator scores from Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic exist yet, and audience metrics remain limited to small-scale platforms like KinoTalk. Hard to say if that changes as the film moves through more festival dates, but for now it's firmly in the early, festival-circuit phase of its life.
Why Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) stays with you
What's striking is how the film refuses to frame Maya's experience as secondary. Grief narratives almost always center the person who lost someone — and rightly so. But Kortmulder's perspective here is more uncomfortable, more honest about something people don't often say out loud: that grief, when it takes hold of someone close to you, can feel like its own kind of abandonment. Maya isn't grieving Mattias's mother. She's grieving the version of Mattias she knew before. That's a morally complicated position to hold, and the film doesn't let her — or us — off the hook for it.
The introspective quality of the filmmaking matches the subject. Rollo van Wijk's cinematography keeps things close and still, the frame often lingering on faces rather than cutting away at the dramatically convenient moment. There's a scene — brief, almost wordless — where Maya watches Mattias from across a room and the distance between them feels physical even though they're only a few meters apart. That image does more work than any expository scene could.
The somber register never tips into self-pity, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. Kortmulder's script is thoughtful in the way it distributes understanding between its two characters — Mattias isn't villainized for withdrawing, and Maya isn't scolded for struggling with it. The film simply observes. Movie OTT editors flagged this one early precisely because that kind of tonal restraint is rare in short-form drama, where the temptation to over-explain is always present.
Where to stream Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) online
Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) is currently available on major OTT services, which means your options depend on your region and your existing subscriptions. The Where-to-Watch widget at the top of this page shows you the most current, up-to-date breakdown of exactly where the film is streaming right now — that widget pulls live data, so it'll reflect any platform changes faster than any editorial text can. Movie OTT tracks streaming availability across a wide range of platforms and updates regularly, so if the film's distribution situation shifts as it continues its festival run, you'll find the latest information here. For a 17-minute film, it's the kind of thing you can fit in almost anywhere — a lunch break, the space between two longer features, a quiet evening when you want something that asks something of you.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Who directed Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias)?
Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) was written and directed by Tessa Kortmulder, a Dutch filmmaker working with support from the Netherlands Film Fund's Wildcard scheme. The film is produced by GROM Productions and represents one of Kortmulder's significant early-career works.
Q: Where can I watch Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias)?
The film is available on major OTT services. For the most accurate and region-specific streaming information, check the Where-to-Watch widget at the top of this page on Movie OTT, which reflects live platform availability.
Q: How long is Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias)?
The film runs approximately 17 minutes, making it a short fiction drama. It is in Dutch with English subtitles available.
Q: Is Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) based on a true story?
There's no public documentation confirming the film is directly autobiographical, though the personal, intimate quality of the storytelling has led some viewers to wonder. Kortmulder has not publicly confirmed a specific real-life basis for the narrative.
Q: Has Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) screened at any film festivals?
Yes — the film screened at Go Short, the International Short Film Festival Nijmegen 2026, in a thematic block centered on relationships and family. It has also been highlighted by SEE NL as part of recent Dutch short film programming.
Final thoughts on Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias)
Nummer 4 (zelfportret met Mattias) won't be for everyone — it's slow, it's quiet, and it asks you to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it. But for viewers who appreciate short-form drama that earns its emotional weight without manufacturing it, this is exactly the kind of film that movieott.com exists to surface. Seventeen minutes. One relationship. A grief that belongs to one person and slowly swallows two. Tessa Kortmulder has made something genuinely thoughtful here, and it deserves to find the audience that will recognize what it's doing.