The Forgotten Battle

If you’re anything like me, your "To Watch" list on Netflix has become a graveyard of high-budget promises that you’ll "get to eventually." We live in an era of streaming saturation where a $14 million historical epic can drop on a Tuesday, trend for forty-eight hours, and then vanish into the digital abyss. The Forgotten Battle (2021) nearly suffered that exact fate, which is a genuine shame because it’s easily one of the most sobering and technically proficient war films produced in the last decade.

I actually stumbled upon this one late on a rainy Sunday night while wearing a pair of wool socks with a massive hole in the left toe. Every time the characters on screen waded through the freezing, waist-deep waters of the Netherlands, I felt a draft on my foot that made the whole experience feel like 4D cinema. It was uncomfortable, bleak, and exactly the right mood for a film that refuses to treat World War II like a heroic playground.

A Three-Pronged Descent into Chaos

Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. (who did the 2011 prequel to The Thing), the film tackles the Battle of the Scheldt—a critical 1944 campaign that most history books gloss over in favor of the flashier D-Day landings. The narrative is split between three perspectives that eventually collide in a muddy, terrifying mess. We follow Teuntje (Susan Radder), a Dutch resistance recruit trying to save her brother; Will (Jamie Flatters), a British glider pilot whose mission goes sideways; and Marinus (Gijs Blom), a Dutch volunteer fighting for the Germans.

It’s the inclusion of Marinus that gives the film its sharpest edge. Watching a "protagonist" in a Nazi uniform is a precarious tightrope walk, but the screenplay by Paula van der Oest doesn’t try to redeem his choices. Instead, it shows the slow, agonizing rot of a man realizing he’s on the wrong side of a losing, genocidal war. Gijs Blom plays Marinus with a hollowed-out stare that suggests he’s already dead, he just hasn’t stopped walking yet. It’s a gutsy move for a contemporary film, avoiding the black-and-white moral simplicity we often see in modern blockbusters.

Action Without the Glamour

In an era of CGI-heavy superhero brawls where characters walk away from building-level explosions with a quip, The Forgotten Battle feels heavy. The action choreography here isn’t meant to be "cool." It’s meant to be exhausting. When Jamie Flatters’ glider goes down, the sequence is a masterclass in claustrophobia and panic. You don't see the ground approaching; you just hear the screaming of stressed metal and the thud of bodies against wood.

The cinematography by Lennert Hillege abandons the saturated, "cinematic" look for something that feels damp and bone-chilling. The color palette is a bruised mixture of slate greys, olive drabs, and muddy browns. It makes Dunkirk look like a pleasant afternoon at a luxury beach resort. There is a sequence near the end involving a bayonet charge across a narrow causeway that is staged with such terrifying clarity that I found myself holding my breath. There’s no shaky-cam nonsense to hide a lack of budget; everything is framed to show you exactly how little cover these kids actually had.

The Sound of Desperation

The sound design is where the film’s "Action" and "History" tags really earn their keep. In the final act, the silence of the flooded polders is broken by the rhythmic clack-clack of bolt-action rifles and the wet, heavy splashing of boots. It’s an aural landscape that emphasizes isolation. Unlike the bombastic scores of the early 2000s, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s music is sparse, letting the environmental sounds do the heavy lifting.

What makes this film stand out in the current "streaming dump" landscape is its refusal to feel like a "TV movie." Despite the modest $14 million budget—which is basically the catering budget for a Marvel film—every cent is on the screen. The production design feels lived-in, rusted, and soaked through. It’s a film that demands to be seen on the biggest screen you have, not scrolled past on a phone during a commute.

The Forgotten Battle is a rare breed of contemporary war cinema that values atmosphere and historical weight over franchise potential. It captures a specific cultural moment where international filmmakers are using streaming platforms to tell their own national stories with Hollywood-level polish. While the three-story structure occasionally feels a bit lopsided—Will’s glider journey sometimes feels like it’s stalling for time—the final collision of their lives is handled with a grim, haunting precision. If you’ve grown tired of the sanitized violence of the multiplex, this is a necessary, mud-caked reality check.