Tim Mielants’s Wil, released on Netflix as WILL, adapts Jeroen Olyslaegers’s prize-winning novel about two auxiliary police officers in Nazi-occupied Antwerp, and it swept the 2024 Ensors before reaching a worldwide streaming audience.

Wil, the 2023 Belgian war drama that Netflix released worldwide on 31 January 2024 under the title WILL, starts from a small order with long consequences. In 1942, in Antwerp under German occupation, two young men begin work as auxiliary police officers, and their commissioner tells them to stand aside and not interfere with whatever the Germans do. The film, directed by Tim Mielants and adapted from the 2016 novel by Jeroen Olyslaegers, follows what happens when they ignore that advice once, and then have to live with the consequences.

A patrol, a body and a city under occupation

Stef Aerts plays Wilfried Wils, known as Wil, and Matteo Simoni plays his colleague Lode Metdepenningen. On their first patrol a German military policeman orders them to help arrest a Jewish family. When the soldier turns violent against a mother and her child, the two officers step in, and in the struggle the German dies. They hide the body. From that point the story becomes a police drama in which the police officers are also the people with something to hide.

As a German investigation tightens under the SS officer Gregor Schnabel, played by Dimitrij Schaad, Wil looks for cover from Felix Verschaffel, a collaborator who claims to have friends on the German side, played by Dirk Roofthooft. Lode’s sister Yvette, played by the newcomer Annelore Crollet, is close to Wil and grows less and less sure where his loyalties lie. With Lode, Yvette and members of the local resistance, Wil helps hide the Jewish family they first met on that patrol in the home of Chaim Litzke, played by the Dutch actor Pierre Bokma. The pressure builds towards a raid, and towards a choice Wil can no longer put off.

The setup is a thriller setup, with a death, a hidden body and an investigation, but the question underneath it is the one the novel made famous in Flanders: how ordinary people end up doing what an occupier wants of them. The title plays on that. Wil is the main character’s nickname, and in Dutch the word also means will, in the sense of wanting and intending something. Netflix added a second L for its international release, so the same film appears as Wil in Belgian listings and as WILL on the platform.

From a prize-winning novel to the screen

Jeroen Olyslaegers, born in Mortsel in 1967, is a novelist and playwright who wrote for Flemish theatre companies and for the artist Jan Fabre before the novel that made his name. WIL, published by De Bezige Bij in August 2016, was the third book in a loose series of novels whose titles all begin with W, after WIJ (2009) and WINST (2012). It won the Fintro Literatuurprijs from both its jury and its readers, the Confituur booksellers’ prize, the F. Bordewijk Prize and the Tzum prize for the best literary sentence of the year, and by 2023 it had been translated into eight languages.

In the book, an elderly Wilfried tells his story years later to one of his descendants, which gives the novel the shape of a confession told from a distance. The screenplay was written by Carl Joos, a veteran Flemish screenwriter whose credits include De Premier and Ritueel, together with Tim Mielants. There is a local coincidence behind the adaptation as well: the director and the novelist were both born in Mortsel, a town on the southern edge of Antwerp, the city where the story takes place.

Tim Mielants, between Peaky Blinders and Cillian Murphy

Tim Mielants, born in 1979, came up through Flemish television, directing episodes of Code 37, Cordon and Professor T., before working abroad on The Tunnel, the whole third series of Peaky Blinders in 2016, Legion, The Terror, Tales from the Loop and the opening episodes of The Responder. His first feature, De Patrick (2019), drawn from childhood summers at a French nudist campsite, won him the best director award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Wil was his second feature and a much larger undertaking: a period production spread over three countries, with a cast drawn from the top of Belgian and Dutch acting. It came just before the two films that took him further into international cinema. Small Things Like These, with Cillian Murphy, opened the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2024, only weeks after Wil reached Netflix, and Steve followed in 2025, again with Murphy in the lead. In 2025 Mielants also received the Flemish Ultima award for film and visual media for the year 2024.

Two leads who had worked together before

Stef Aerts, born in Turnhout in 1987, is a member of the theatre collective FC Bergman and is known on screen for Adem (2010) and Felix Van Groeningen’s Belgica (2016). Matteo Simoni, born the same year in Hasselt, played the lead in Stijn Coninx’s Marina (2013), was one of the European Shooting Stars at the Berlinale in 2018 and won an Ensor in 2023 for his supporting role in Zillion. The two had already shared the screen as leads of the Flemish series Callboys, which earned them and their co-stars a joint acting award at the FIPA festival in Biarritz in 2017.

Around them, Mielants assembled a wide ensemble. Jan Bijvoet plays the police commissioner Jean, and the cast also includes Jan Decleir, Els Dottermans, Koen De Bouw, Kevin Janssens, Gene Bervoets and Sofie Decleir from Belgium, Pierre Bokma and Karina Smulders from the Netherlands, and the German actors Dimitrij Schaad and Pit Bukowski. Annelore Crollet, then at the start of her career, completed the central trio, which the producers presented as three young people trying to survive in an occupied city.

A three-country production

Wil was produced by Lecter Scripted Media, Menuetto Film and Minds Meet, in co-production with Les Films du Fleuve from Wallonia, Topkapi Films from the Netherlands and K&K Selekt Films from Poland. Its backers included the Flemish film fund VAF, Screen Flanders, the French-speaking Belgian film centre CCA, the Belgian tax shelter, the Netherlands Film Fund and, already at the shooting stage, Kinepolis Film Distribution and Netflix. Shooting began in May 2022 and ran until mid-July, in Belgium and in Poland. The dialogue is mostly Flemish Dutch, with German and French spoken where the occupation and the city require it.

Behind the camera, the cinematographer was Robrecht Heyvaert, whose earlier credits include Zillion, Patser and the Hollywood sequel Bad Boys for Life. The score is by Geert Hellings, the editing by Bert Jacobs and the production design by Bart Van Loo, whose task was to rebuild a wartime Antwerp of 1942.

Antwerp in 1942

The setting is not an abstract wartime city. In the summer of 1942 the German occupiers began mass round-ups of Jews in Belgium, and in Antwerp, in August of that year, local police officers took part in raids on Jewish neighbourhoods, while the authorities in Brussels refused to put their police at the occupier’s disposal for the same work. A 2007 study commissioned by the Belgian Senate, published as Gewillig België (Docile Belgium), documented that cooperation in detail. Most Jews deported from Belgium passed through the Dossin barracks in Mechelen, between Antwerp and Brussels, and only a small minority of the more than 25,000 people sent east from there survived.

That is the history the novel and the film draw on. A pair of auxiliary officers told to stand aside sits close to the choices the city’s real police force faced, which is why the story landed in Flanders as more than a period thriller. It asks the local audience to look at its own streets, its own institutions and, by extension, its own families.

Ensors, box office and the Netflix numbers

Wil opened in Belgian cinemas on 27 September 2023 through Kinepolis Film Distribution and became one of the local box-office successes of that autumn, with Paradiso handling the release in the Netherlands. In October 2023 Mielants received the Jo Röpcke award from the magazine Knack Focus for the film. At the Ensors, the Flemish film and television awards handed out at the Ostend film festival, Wil went into the ceremony of 3 February 2024 with 14 nominations and came away with seven prizes, including best film, best director for Tim Mielants, best screenplay for Carl Joos, best actor for Stef Aerts and best supporting actor for Jan Bijvoet.

Netflix, which had supported the production, released the film worldwide on 31 January 2024 as WILL, with dubbed versions in languages including English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Czech and Hindi. In its first week it was the fifth most-watched non-English film on Netflix worldwide, with 3.4 million views, and it entered the national top 10 in 16 countries, from Spain, Italy and Poland to Argentina and Uruguay, while topping the chart in Belgium. In its second week it rose to fourth place globally with another 2.6 million views.

Where Wil sits

Wil belongs to a run of European productions about the Second World War that Netflix has taken to a global audience, alongside the Dutch The Forgotten Battle and the Norwegian Narvik. Its focus is narrower than either: not a front line but a police station, not soldiers but civil servants in uniform, and a story in which the investigation and the moral question are the same thing.

How well that balance works between thriller and reckoning is for each viewer to judge. What the record shows is that a Flemish novel about collaboration, written for a local readership, became a seven-Ensor film and then a global Netflix release, and that its central question, what you do when you are told to look away, travelled well beyond Antwerp.

Tags: Annelore Crollet, Jeroen Olyslaegers, Matteo Simoni, Stef Aerts, Tim Mielants, WILL