This World War II drama of collaboration and resistance is stunningly brutal
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Will, Netflix's imported Belgian film about the moral impossibility of life under Nazi occupation in World War II, announces itself with shocking bluntness. Within the first 10 minutes, it's made clear that co-writer and director Tim Mielants intends to confront the horrifying horrors of the Holocaust head-on. But it's also clear that the film is constructed more like a thriller than a dark drama, and it tightens the screws on its main character – young policeman Wilfried Wils (Stef Aerts) – in a series of breathless set pieces with escalating stakes.
It's an effective way to make viewers empathize with the dire dilemmas faced by an occupied population, and to bear witness anew to familiar horrors. But the thriller genre sets up expectations – climax, catharsis, redemption – that risk trivializing the material and setting something of an ethical trap. Who will fall into it: the filmmakers or the audience? The Mielants are too tough-minded to get caught, it turns out, but that's bad news for the rest of us. Will manages a glimmer of hope in the darkness, only to extinguish it completely. This is a bleak, bleak film.
It is 1942, and Wil (referred to in the subtitles by the Dutch spelling of his name, despite the English title Will) and Lode (Matteo Simoni) are newly recruited to the police force in the port city of Antwerp. Before their first patrol, their commanding officer, Jean (Jan Bijvoet), dispenses regulatory platitudes about the police being "mediators between our people and the Germans." Then he drops that performance and offers some off-the-record advice: "You just stand there and watch." The ambiguity of these words echoes throughout the film. Is it cowardice to stand by and watch the Nazis at work, or heroism to refuse to cooperate with them? Do the occupied Belgians wash their hands of the crimes of the Nazis, or do they bear witness to them?
