High Tides on Netflix ends where it always threatened to: inside the collapse

When a series about the wealthy young residents of Belgium’s most expensive coastal enclave commits its entire three-season arc to a character managing bipolar disorder, it is telling the audience something precise. Not that mental health stories belong in glossy settings — many series have demonstrated that without consequence — but that the specific social world being depicted is the thing making the mental health crisis structural. That the performance of effortlessness required to belong in Knokke and the neurological reality that disrupts the capacity for that performance are not separate subjects. They are the same subject, looked at from two different angles. High Tides, known in Belgium as Knokke Off, understood this from its first episode. Its final season, which brings Louise Basteyns back from a psychiatric institution to the coastal world that broke her, is the reckoning the show has been building toward since the beginning.

Knokke-Heist sits at the northeastern edge of Belgium, where the country ends at the Dutch border and the beaches of the North Sea run up against some of the most insulated real estate in Europe. This is not a wealthy place in the way that aspirational television typically deploys wealthy places. The Zoute district, where the Vandael villas and the Basteyns properties and the beach clubs the show has used as its social architecture are concentrated, has property values that average over three million euros — transactions funded through dividends and business sales rather than mortgages, because the buyers here are not income-wealthy. They are asset-wealthy, in a specific and Belgian way. They have inherited their position. They have not achieved it and they are not trying to maintain it through effort. They are trying to maintain it through continuity. The summer at Knokke is not a reward. It is an obligation. Your family has always come here. You come here because that is what your family does. The social world this creates is not dynamic with aspiration. It is static with expectation.

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What a world built on expectation does to the people inside it is what High Tides has been examining all along. Louise Basteyns has the position, the family, the relationships, the looks — every marker the social world distributes to those who belong by right — and she has been hospitalized. Not because the world rejected her but because it demanded something her neurological reality could not sustain: the permanent performance of composure, the social requirement of effortlessness, the unwritten rule that in Knokke you do not let anyone see what is happening underneath the surface. Bipolar disorder is, among other things, a condition that disrupts the capacity for emotional regulation. The world of Knokke demands nothing more insistently than emotional regulation. The show’s structural choice — to place a woman with this specific condition at the center of its most aspirational setting — is not a character decision. It is an argument.

Pommelien Thijs, who plays Louise across all three seasons, is 25, Belgium’s biggest young star by any current measure, and brings to the role a quality that is difficult to articulate but immediately recognizable: she makes Louise’s social ease and her inner volatility simultaneously visible without letting either one consume the other. The performance of Season 3 will be, by the logic of where the story has arrived, the hardest of the three. Returning from a psychiatric institution is not the same dramatic register as having a breakdown, and the show knows this. What Thijs is being asked to play is not crisis but aftermath: the provisional state, the person who is functional and not yet whole and trying to determine whether the place she is returning to can be trusted. That is a register that aspirational television rarely demands because it requires the performance to be legible in restraint rather than expression. Thijs’s critical reception in Flanders across the first two seasons suggests the register has been found.

Against this, Season 3 positions the collapse of the Vandael real estate empire. Willem De Schryver’s Alexander Vandael is not a wealthy young man who stands to lose money. He is a person whose identity is architecturally identical to his family’s financial position. The Vandaels do not have wealth in addition to their Knokke identity; their Knokke identity is the wealth, expressed as property, expressed as pieces of the town itself. When the empire begins to fail, Alex is not facing financial difficulty. He is facing identity dissolution. De Schryver has built this character through compression across two seasons — the emotional truth visible in the precision of the stillness, the damage legible in the control rather than its failure. A man using composure as social currency, now using it to manage simultaneous catastrophes, is a performance that requires the discipline to never let the catastrophes be seen while ensuring the audience can feel their weight. The Season 3 trailer carries this quality: something behind the eyes that the face is working very hard to manage.

Eliyha Altena’s Daan Paroti completes the structural triangle, and his arc is the show’s most honest and most uncomfortable argument. He arrived in Season 1 from Breda, genuinely outside — not just from a working-class background but from the Netherlands, from a caravan on the Dutch side of the border, a summer worker at a beach club. Three seasons later, he is co-managing a cover-up of a killing with the heir of the family that metaphorically owns the town. Thomas’s body was buried in one of the Vandaels’ construction sites: the crime is literally embedded in the family’s property, which means the violence and the wealth and the social architecture of Knokke are occupying the same physical ground. Daan absorbed the world he entered, and the absorption required him to commit, along with Alex, to a lie that excludes the one person he actually loves. This is not a redemption arc. The show — specifically scriptwriter Luk Wyns, who grew up adjacent to this world and knows from direct observation that not everything smelled of roses for the Knokke kids — has been honest enough to let Daan’s journey be what it is. The outsider who wanted in got in. The cost of getting in was becoming, slowly and not entirely consciously, someone he would not have recognized when he arrived.

High Tides entered a genre tradition with a clear lineage — Elite’s precision about class resentment and what it generates when given enough institutional pressure, Young Royals’ formal elegance in using a privileged setting to examine whether an institution can contain a genuine person, The OC’s foundational argument about the outsider who enters a coastal enclave and what that entry costs. What it does with this tradition that its predecessors did not attempt is make the crime that results from class aspiration physically inseparable from the architecture of privilege. The Vandaels’ construction sites contain both the family’s wealth and the secret of what Daan’s desire to be part of that wealth produced. There is no metaphor here that has not been made literal.

The sociological reality underlying this drama is documented rather than invented. Research on affluent young people has established consistently that privilege generates specific and underexamined vulnerabilities: the parenting mode identified in academic literature as concerted cultivation — in which childhood is treated as a sequence of performance preparations rather than a period of natural development — produces young people who are skilled at demonstrating competence and unprepared for the experience of genuine failure. Columbia University research has described the privileged young as more vulnerable today than in previous generations, not despite their advantages but as a product of them. Louise Basteyns is not an exception to the world she was born into. She is its product, shaped precisely by its demands, broken by the gap between what those demands required and what her actual neurological reality could provide. Knokke gave her everything and made the everything intolerable.

Director Anthony Schatteman, whose debut feature Young Hearts premiered in Berlin and received a Special Mention from the Generation Kplus jury for its precise and restrained treatment of a young person managing feelings the social environment cannot accommodate, brings to this final season a visual sensibility exactly suited to what the material requires. His formal approach — staying with the face, making the internal legible through the contained rather than the expressive, trusting the performance to carry what the dialogue cannot — is the register the season needs. Louise’s return to Knokke is not a scene that benefits from spectacle. It benefits from the kind of quiet observation that reveals what is happening beneath the social performance of being fine.

High Tides - Netflix — High Tides – Netflix

High Tides Season 3 premieres on Netflix globally on April 3, 2026, with Belgium’s VRT broadcasting first. The season is the third and final: Netflix confirmed the series will not continue beyond this conclusion. The production is a Dingie production for VRT and Netflix, in collaboration with Dutch FilmWorks, with support from the City of Knokke-Heist and the Belgian Federal Government’s Tax Shelter initiative. New cast additions for Season 3 include established Dutch actor Daan Schuurmans as Anton Vermeer, a figure described as a sworn enemy whose arrival at the moment of the Vandael empire’s vulnerability is unlikely to be coincidental, and newcomer Nola Elvis Kemper.

The question the series has been asking for three seasons — and that it is now positioned to leave open rather than resolve, because it is the kind of question that only a setting can raise and no amount of money can close — is whether a person can be known for who they are inside a social world that has categorized them before they had the chance to become anything. Louise returns to Knokke already sorted: the one who broke, the one who left, the one who came back. Alex is the Vandaels before he is anything else. Daan arrived as the outsider and the outsider is now the only thing he no longer is. What the final season of High Tides is asking of its three central characters — and of the social architecture that holds all three of them in place — is whether the person underneath the category can be recovered. Whether the identity assembled inside a privileged world that demanded performance first and allowed personhood second is an identity that can survive the collapse of the world that built it. Whether what is left, when the empire fails and the secret surfaces and the institution that housed Louise releases her back into the world that sent her there — whether what is left is something that could be called a self. Knokke does not answer this question. It is the place that made the question necessary.