Willem van Oranje: A dusty walk through history

Is it worth the time?

Honestly, only if you have a very specific appetite for black-and-white historical dramas that feel like they were filmed in a theater attic. If you prefer high-energy storytelling, you will probably be asleep by the twenty-minute mark. But if you’re the kind of person who likes seeing how old cinema tackled massive, decades-spanning biographies, there is something weirdly charming about it.

It’s not exactly a thrill ride.

The whole thing plays out in these short, rigid episodes. It feels less like a movie and more like a series of stage plays that someone decided to film because they had a camera lying around. The acting is very much of its time—loud, pointed, and full of dramatic pauses that feel like they last for an entire calendar year.

Oddly specific observations

There is a scene involving the lead-up to the Eighty Years War where the costumes look so stiff I swear you can hear them crinkle whenever someone turns their head. It is distracting in a way that’s almost hypnotic. 🧐

The pacing is genuinely bizarre. It skips over years like it’s checking off items on a grocery list. One minute you’re looking at a map, and the next, everyone is wearing slightly different hats and talking about a murder that’s about to happen.

It reminded me a bit of the disjointed, almost experimental vibe I caught in The Medicine Man, though this one takes itself much more seriously. Way, way more seriously. Nobody here is having fun. Everyone is just very concerned about the state of the Netherlands.

• The lighting is often just a single bulb doing way too much work.
• The dialogue feels like it was lifted directly from a textbook that nobody actually likes.
• There is a distinct lack of extras in the background. Sometimes a 'crowd' is just three people standing near a wall.

There’s this one reaction shot when the assassination happens—it just hangs there. It’s so long that you start to wonder if the projectionist fell asleep or if the film just got stuck in the gate. It’s not even dramatic; it’s just awkward. I kind of loved it, actually.

If you go into this expecting something like a modern prestige biopic, you’re going to have a bad time. It’s clunky. It’s dusty. It moves at the speed of a tired snail. But, if you like the weird, forgotten corners of film history, it’s a strange little artifact to pull off the shelf.

Just don't expect it to explain the history well. You’ll be doing a lot of Googling to figure out who is who and why they are yelling at each other in the dark. 🕯️