Wil

When everything is dark, the shades begin to disappear
Nazi occupation is, by definition, morally suffocating territory, and WILL chooses to offer almost no relief. The film places its characters in a world where every decision feels tainted, every silence carries consequences and any attempt to do the right thing comes too late or at a price. That constant darkness is both its main strength and, eventually, what tired me.
Tim Mielants handles the sense of threat very well. Antwerp appears as a watched, sick city where nobody fully knows who is observing, who is collaborating, who is resisting or who is simply trying to survive. The film avoids presenting occupation as a comfortable board of perfectly separated heroes and villains, and in that sense it is more interesting than many stories set in the same period.
What interests it is the grey area: how far someone can go to protect themselves, when caution becomes cowardice, when obedience becomes collaboration and how heavily it weighs afterwards to have chosen not to act. That moral conflict is well handled because it offers no reassuring answers. Almost every character carries fear, guilt or contradiction, and the film insists that surviving does not necessarily mean emerging clean.
Stef Aerts sustains that tone well. His performance works through discomfort, doubt and the constant feeling that every gesture has consequences. He does not need to become a conventional hero to remain interesting. It is precisely his moral fragility that makes the character more human, although it also contributes to the film's relentless bleakness.
Matteo Simoni and Annelore Crollet fit well into this world of difficult loyalties and impossible decisions. The cast generally works because nobody seems to be playing an abstract idea of good or evil. Even when certain characters occupy very clear positions, the film tries to preserve some human texture around them.
The staging is probably what convinced me most. There is dirt, coldness, enclosed spaces and a visual palette that constantly reinforces the feeling of oppression. Mielants wants the period to feel physical, uncomfortable and almost airless. At times the tone becomes deliberately unpleasant or grotesque, but that fits the decision not to beautify the context.
The problem is that all of this eventually accumulates too much. The film is bleak from the start and barely changes emotional frequency. Guilt, fear, violence, hopelessness, surveillance, betrayal: almost everything pushes in the same direction. Eventually, so much negativity stops increasing the intensity and starts producing a certain monotony.
That is where it felt a little long to me. Not because the running time is extreme, but because emotionally it seems to stretch further than necessary. When almost every scene confirms that the world is terrible and every possible way out has consequences, the viewer begins to anticipate the tone before the next situation even arrives.
I also think the film could have benefited from more contrast. I do not mean comic relief or softening a brutal historical reality, but allowing more moments of normality, affection or even hope so that the darkness would weigh more heavily when it returned. If everything is black, it eventually becomes difficult to distinguish the shades within the black.
Even so, I do not think it is a bad film. It has craft, atmosphere, strong performances and a moral perspective that is much less comfortable than usual. I can easily understand why its fatalism may strongly affect some viewers. It interested me more than it moved me.
WILL lands somewhere in the middle for me: serious, well made and full of worthwhile ideas about collaboration, resistance and guilt, but too determined to keep every trace of light outside. That insistence eventually wears down some of its force. I watched it with interest, but also with the feeling that it could have said the same thing with a little less running time and considerably more contrast.