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

Will, Netflix’s imported Belgian film concerning the ethical impossibility of life beneath Nazi occupation throughout World War II, proclaims itself with stunning bluntness. Within its first 10 minutes, it’s made clear that co-writer and director Tim Mielants intends to confront the grisly horrors of the Holocaust head-on. But it’s additionally obvious that the movie is constructed extra like a thriller than a somber drama, and it tightens the screws on its lead character — younger policeman Wilfried Wils (Stef Aerts) — in a sequence of breathless setups with escalating stakes.

It’s an efficient approach to pull viewers into empathizing with the terrible dilemmas confronted by an occupied inhabitants, and into bearing contemporary witness to acquainted horrors. But the thriller style units up expectations — climax, catharsis, redemption — which danger trivializing the fabric, and set one thing of an moral lure. Who’s going to fall into it: the filmmakers, or the viewers? Mielants is too tough-minded to be caught, it seems, however that’s dangerous information for the remainder of us. Will nurses a glimmer of hope within the darkness, solely to snuff it out fully. This is a bleak, bleak film.

It’s 1942, and Wil (referred to within the subtitles by the Dutch spelling of his title, regardless of the English title Will) and Lode (Matteo Simoni) are contemporary recruits to the police drive within the port metropolis of Antwerp. Before their first patrol, their commanding officer, Jean (Jan Bijvoet), fingers out regulation platitudes concerning the police being “mediators between our people and the Germans.” Then he sheds that pretense and presents some off-the-record recommendation: “You stand there and you just watch.” The ambiguity of those phrases echoes by the entire film. Is it cowardice to stand by and watch the Nazis at work, or heroism to refuse to cooperate with them? Are the occupied Belgians washing their fingers of the Nazis’ crimes, or bearing witness to them?

Wil and Lode don’t have lengthy to ponder these questions. No sooner have they left the station on their first patrol than a ranting, drugged-up German soldier calls for they accompany him on the arrest of some individuals who “refuse to work”: a Jewish household, in different phrases. The younger males are initially paralyzed by the state of affairs, however issues spiral uncontrolled, extra by desperation than heroic resistance on the a part of the 2 policemen. In the aftermath, Lode and Wil return to work in a state of paranoid terror.

Image: Les Films Du Fleuve/Netflix

Mielants, working with screenwriter Carl Joos from a novel by Jeroen Olyslaegers, wastes no time in utilizing this premise to discover the paranoid quagmire of the occupied metropolis. Can the 2 younger males belief one another? Where do their sympathies lie? Wil’s civil-servant father leads him to search assist from native worthy Felix Verschaffel (the superb Dirk Roofthooft), who boasts of being buddies with the Germans’ commanding officer, Gregor Schnabel (Dimitrij Schaad). Suddenly, Wil is indebted to a grasping, antisemitic collaborator.

Meanwhile, Lode’s mistrustful household — particularly his fiery sister Yvette (Annelore Crollet) — need to know extra. Does Wil communicate any German at dwelling? What radio station does he hear to? In occupied Antwerp — a area the place German and French phrases naturally combine in with the native Dutch dialect — an harmless selection of phrase or of leisure listening comes freighted with harmful political significance. “There isn’t much on the radio,” Wil responds. “Can you recommend something?”

Time and once more throughout the film, Wil makes use of deflections like this to squirm out of taking a place on the occupation. But finally, he begins working to save Jewish lives. Actions could communicate louder than phrases, however even within the enamel of a febrile affair with Yvette, Wil continues to maintain his phrases to himself. As Schnabel’s internet closes in, Wil’s warning retains him and his buddies alive, however the associated fee is heavy.

It’s a daring transfer to middle a thriller concerning the Holocaust on a protagonist who, on some stage, refuses to choose a aspect. We can solely empathize with Wil as a result of Mielants so successfully masses almost each scene and line of dialogue with implicit menace. Will is a tense, dark, horrifying film, filmed claustrophobically in a boxy ratio with lenses that blur the sting of the body. The appearing is intense (generally to a fault), and there are frequent bursts of disagreeable, graphic violence because the stress builds.

Photo: Les Films Du Fleuve/Netflix

But though Schaad generally appears to be doing a weak impression of Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Will isn’t that film, and Mielants isn’t involved in Tarantino’s model of catharsis. At the top of the film, the vicious, inescapable lure he set for all of the characters merely snaps shut. Will exhibits that beneath the remorseless illogic of Nazi occupation, survival is collaboration, and resistance is demise.

That’s a depressing payload for the film to carry, and it’s debatable how constructive it is. Jonathan Glazer’s chilling The Zone of Interest, at the moment in theaters, exhibits that difficult new views on the human mechanics of the Holocaust are as important now as they’ve ever been. Thirty years in the past, Schindler’s List achieved one thing related, and simply as essential, by radically completely different means: It discovered a thread of hope and compassion that would lead a large viewers into the guts of the nightmare and throw it into reduction.

Will is too burdened by its perspective to handle something related. It’s clear-sighted on the merciless compromises of occupation and collaboration, however so fatalistic about them that it winds up wallowing in its personal guilt and hopelessness. That’s a dark sort of fact, and never essentially one which anybody wants to hear.

Will is streaming on Netflix now.