Invasion (2024)
The Dutch Caribbean islands of Curaçao and Aruba sit roughly sixty kilometres off the northern coast of Venezuela, a pair of small, sun-bleached territories with a genuinely complex relationship with the Netherlands stretching back centuries. That geopolitical reality, modest in scale but rich in tension, forms the backdrop for Invasion (or Invasie in its native Dutch), a 2024 action thriller from Storytellers Film & TV that attempts something relatively rare in Dutch commercial cinema: a home-grown military action film with Caribbean settings and a premise ripped from the kind of geopolitical anxieties that feel broadly relevant across much of the Western world right now. On paper, at least, the idea of small, poorly defended territories suddenly on the front line of an unexpected armed conflict carries real dramatic weight. Films like Monos have demonstrated how effectively young people caught up in armed conflict can anchor that sort of story, and the war-as-disorientation subgenre has produced genuinely memorable work when handled with care.
Behind the camera is Bobby Boermans, a director who has built a solid reputation within Dutch genre filmmaking. His 2013 thriller App found a reasonable audience domestically and performed well enough on the international festival circuit to suggest a filmmaker comfortable with genre mechanics and technical filmmaking. Storytellers Film & TV, the Amsterdam-based production company behind the project, has been a consistent presence in Dutch film and television, and the choice to shoot on location in Curaçao and Aruba gives Invasion a visual setting that most European action films simply cannot offer. Whether the budget was sufficient to do justice to the scale of the story being told is, in hindsight, a fair question to raise. The script centres on a fictional neighbouring nation called Veragua launching a sudden, large-scale military assault on the islands, with the Dutch government caught entirely flat-footed, and three young Navy recruits thrust into the middle of a rapidly escalating conflict.
That trio is played by Tarikh Janssen, Gijs Blom, and Jasha Rudge, three young Dutch actors with varying degrees of prior screen experience. Blom, perhaps the most recognisable of the group internationally, appeared in the acclaimed Dutch drama Jongens and has demonstrated genuine range in quieter, character-driven material. Fedja van Huêt, a well-regarded presence in Dutch film and television for some years, brings a degree of professional weight to the supporting cast, and Ortál Vriend rounds out a line-up that, on paper at least, is polished but unremarkable for this kind of genre production. The question, as always with ensemble action thrillers, is whether the material gives any of them enough to work with. For those interested in how young performers handle the pressures of conflict-adjacent drama, it is worth looking at what a film like Megdan: Between Water and Fire manages with similar raw ingredients, or indeed how straightforward action mechanics are handled in something like Rambo: First Blood Part II, a film that at least commits fully to its own internal logic.
I went into Bobby Boermans’ 2024 Dutch action thriller Invasion (or Invasie) completely blind and with an open mind, but honestly, I came out completely baffled. The premise is that a neighbouring country called Veragua suddenly launches a massive, unprovoked attack on the tiny Caribbean islands of Curaçao and Aruba, catching the Dutch government entirely off guard.
We then follow three young Navy recruits, played by the likes of Joes Brauers, as they try to figure out what the right thing to do is. The problem? The story is just wildly unbelievable. The idea that some random country would roll up with a fleet of warships to invade two small islands for practically no reason is so ludicrous it breaks the suspension of disbelief before the opening credits have even finished rolling.
If the script was the first major hurdle, the audio was the nail in the coffin. The sound quality throughout the film is just really weird and incredibly distracting. Some of the dialogue is practically inaudible, while the background soundtrack is cranked up so loud it drowns out everything else. I’m almost certain this is because I watched the English-dubbed version, and it clearly hasn't been dubbed well at all. The acting ends up being awful as a direct result, with the dubbed voices completely failing to match the people they represent on screen. To be fair to the cast, I don't believe the native Dutch audio track would have been much better, as the performances themselves feel incredibly wooden, but the post-production audio mix is a proper mess.
I will give credit where it’s due: the film does have some decent cinematography, capturing the tropical locations nicely, and the special effects for the explosives are at least "ok" when they decide to show them. But you can’t polish a turd, and no amount of pretty island shots or fiery blast radiuses can save a movie when the core narrative is this flimsy and the technical execution is this sloppy. Overall, Invasion is just a baffling, disjointed mess of a film that never figures out what it wants to be. It’s a chaotic, poorly mixed, and utterly unbelievable misfire that I really can't recommend to anyone.
Invasion arrives at a moment when European cinema, the Dutch industry included, is clearly interested in expanding into more commercially minded genre territory, and there is something worth acknowledging in the ambition behind that push. A military thriller set in the Dutch Caribbean, filmed on location and aimed at a broad audience, is not a modest undertaking. But ambition and execution are different things, and a film that cannot hold its own basic premise together, regardless of how scenic the backdrop or how capable individual members of the cast might be elsewhere, struggles to justify the investment of time it asks from a viewer. It is the kind of film that makes you wish, more than anything, that someone had spent a few more weeks in the writers' room. Good locations do not make a good film. They just make the disappointment sunnier.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-06-12
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Invasion (2024) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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