My Best Friend Anne Frank

Most of us know Anne Frank as a symbol—a sepia-toned face on a book cover, a voice for millions of silenced lives, an icon of hope preserved in the amber of her own prose. We don't often think of her as the girl who might ditch her best friend to flirt with a boy, or the teenager who could be a little bit of a "mean girl" when she felt like it. That is exactly where My Best Friend Anne Frank (2021) steps in, and it’s why the film actually works in an era of historical drama fatigue.

Directed by Ben Sombogaart, this Dutch production (which found its global footing via Netflix) chooses to look away from the Secret Annex and instead focuses on Hannah Goslar. I watched this on my laptop while a very persistent fly kept trying to land on my forehead, which made the scenes of buzzing flies in the barracks feel a bit too "4D" for my liking, but even that distraction couldn't pull me away from the film’s central hook: Anne Frank is kind of a brat in this, and honestly, it’s the best thing about the movie.

The Gold and the Gray

The film utilizes a dual-timeline structure that creates a jarring, intentional whiplash. We bounce between 1942 Amsterdam, filmed in sun-drenched, oversaturated golds and ambers, and 1945 Bergen-Belsen, which looks like the color has been physically scrubbed out of the celluloid with steel wool.

In the Amsterdam scenes, we see Aiko Beemsterboer as Anne and Josephine Arendsen as Hannah (Hanneli). Their chemistry is the engine of the film. Beemsterboer plays Anne with a flighty, magnetic energy—she’s the "it girl" of their small circle, full of big dreams and a sharp tongue that occasionally stings Hannah. It’s a refreshing take. By humanizing Anne, making her flawed and sometimes selfish, the film makes the eventual tragedy feel more like a theft of a real life rather than the closing of a textbook.

Josephine Arendsen, meanwhile, is the soul of the piece. As Hannah, she carries the burden of being the "loyal one," the friend who is constantly in Anne’s shadow but refuses to leave it. When the movie shifts to the camp, Arendsen portrays the hollowed-out desperation of survival with a quiet intensity that never feels like "awards bait." She’s just a girl trying to keep her sister alive while obsessively wondering if her friend escaped to Switzerland.

A New Kind of Holocaust Cinema

We are currently in a moment where "prestige" war films are grappling with how to stay relevant to a generation that didn't grow up with survivors visiting their classrooms. Streaming platforms have become the new curators of these stories, often leaning into high-gloss production values to compete with blockbusters. My Best Friend Anne Frank fits this "Netflix-era" mold—it’s visually polished, almost to a fault in the Amsterdam sequences, but it uses that beauty to sharpen the pain of the camp scenes.

The film sidesteps the "Secret Annex" entirely. We don't see the bookcase; we don't see the quiet tip-toeing. Instead, we see the people who were left behind, the ones who didn't get a hiding spot. It’s a perspective that feels necessary now, reminding us that the famous stories we know are often outliers. Most people didn't have an annex.

There’s a tension in the third act that feels more like a thriller than a biopic, as Hannah discovers Anne is just on the other side of a hay-filled fence in the camp. The "wall" between them—symbolic of their diverging fates—becomes a physical barrier they try to breach with scraps of food and whispered memories. It’s heart-wrenching, but Sombogaart avoids the trap of turning it into a melodrama, letting the inherent horror of the situation do the heavy lifting.

The Problem of the Polish

If I have a gripe, it’s that the film sometimes leans a bit too hard into its "contemporary cinema" aesthetic. Some of the Amsterdam scenes feel like they’ve been run through a high-end Instagram filter, and the musical score by Merlijn Snitker occasionally tells the audience exactly how to feel instead of trusting the actors to do it.

However, the performances by the supporting cast, particularly Roeland Fernhout as Hannah’s father, ground the film in a domestic reality. The scenes of the Goslar family trying to maintain a sense of dignity—clinging to their "Albalonga" passports that supposedly offered protection—are some of the most stressful moments in the film. It captures that specific, modern anxiety of watching a bureaucracy slowly turn into a death trap.

Ultimately, this isn't a film about the "Spirit of Anne Frank." It’s a film about the complicated, messy, sometimes-annoying, and deeply vital bond between two girls who didn't know they were characters in a tragedy. They just thought they were growing up.

My Best Friend Anne Frank manages to carve out a unique space in a very crowded genre by focusing on the friction of friendship rather than just the facts of history. It’s a beautifully acted, visually striking reminder that the people we turn into icons were once just kids who were bad at sharing secrets. If you're looking for a fresh perspective on a story you think you already know, this one is well worth the stream.