Netflix’s gritty WWII thriller Will is almost too dark to watch

will, Netflix’s imported Belgian film about the moral impossibility of life under Nazi occupation during World War II, announces itself with shocking frankness. It’s clear in the first ten minutes that co-writer and director Tim Mielants intends to confront the horrific horrors of the Holocaust head-on. But it’s also obvious that the film is structured more like a thriller than a dark drama, tightening the screws on its main character, the young police officer Wilfried Wils (Stef Aerts), in a series of breathless productions with rising stakes.

It’s an effective way to make viewers empathize with the horrific dilemmas of an occupied population and become new witnesses to familiar horrors. But the thriller genre creates expectations – climax, catharsis, redemption – that risk trivializing the material and setting a kind of ethical trap. Who will fall in: the filmmakers or the audience? It turns out Mielants is too stubborn to get caught, but that’s bad news for the rest of us. will nurtures a glimmer of hope in the darkness, only to extinguish it completely. This is a dark, dark film.

The year is 1942 and Wil (mentioned in the subtitles by the Dutch spelling of his name, despite the English title). will

) and Lode (Matteo Simoni) are new police recruits in the port city of Antwerp. Before their first patrol, their commander Jean (Jan Bijvoet) dishes out scripted platitudes about the police as “intermediaries between our people and the Germans.” Then he drops this pretense and offers unofficial advice: “You stand there and just watch.” The ambiguity of these words permeates the entire film. Is it cowardice to watch the Nazis at work or heroism to refuse to cooperate with them? Are the occupied Belgians washing their hands of or bearing witness to the crimes of the Nazis?

Wil and Lode don’t have long to think about these questions. They have barely left the train station on their first patrol when a ranting, drugged German soldier asks them to accompany him in arresting some “work refusers”: a Jewish family. The young men are initially paralyzed by the situation, but things spiral out of control, more out of desperation than the heroic resistance of the two police officers. Lode and Wil subsequently return to work in a state of paranoid fear.

Mielants, working with screenwriter Carl Joos based on a novel by Jeroen Olyslaegers, wastes no time in using this premise to explore the paranoid quagmire of the occupied city. Can the two young men trust each other? Where do their sympathies lie? Wil’s father, a civil servant, leads him to seek help from local Felix Verschaffel (the excellent Dirk Roofthooft), who boasts of being friends with the German commanding officer, Gregor Schnabel (Dimitrij Schaad). Suddenly Wil finds himself in the debt of a greedy, anti-Semitic collaborator.

Meanwhile, Lode’s suspicious family – especially his fiery sister Yvette (Annelore Crollet) – wants to know more. Does Wil speak German at home? What radio station does he listen to? In occupied Antwerp – a region where German and French idioms naturally mix with the local Dutch dialect – an innocent choice of words or a relaxed listening experience is laden with dangerous political meaning. “There’s not much on the radio,” Wil replies. “Can you recommend something?”

Over the course of the film, Wil repeatedly uses distractions like this to avoid commenting on the crew. But eventually he begins to work to save Jewish lives. Actions may speak louder than words, but even despite a feverish affair with Yvette, Wil continues to keep his words to himself. As Schnabel’s web tightens, Wil’s caution keeps him and his friends alive, but the price is high.

It’s a bold move in a thriller about the Holocaust to focus on a protagonist who, in some ways, refuses to choose a side. We can only empathize with Wil because Mielants so effectively charges almost every scene and line of dialogue with implicit menace. will

is a tense, dark, frightening film, filmed claustrophobically in a boxy ratio with lenses that blur the edges of the frame. The acting is intense (sometimes over the top) and there are frequent outbursts of unpleasant, graphic violence as the pressure mounts.

But even if Schaad sometimes seems to be making a weak imitation of Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, will that’s not the movie, and Mielants isn’t interested in Tarantino’s style of catharsis. At the end of the film, the vicious, inescapable trap it has set for all the characters simply snaps shut. will shows that under the merciless illogic of the Nazi occupation, survival means collaboration and resistance means death.

That’s a pathetic payload for the film, and it’s questionable how constructive it is. Jonathan Glazer is scary The zone of interest, currently in theaters, shows that challenging new perspectives on the human mechanics of the Holocaust are as important today as ever. Thirty years ago, Schindlers List By completely different means, it achieved something similar and equally necessary: ​​it found a thread of hope and compassion that could lead a wide audience into the heart of the nightmare and bring them into relief.

will is too burdened by his point of view to handle something similar. It is clear-eyed about the cruel compromises of occupation and collaboration, but so fatalistic that it wallows in its own guilt and hopelessness. This is a dark truth and not one that anyone needs to hear.

will is now streaming on Netflix.