Dylan Haegens’ movie (2018)

Directed by: Dylan Haegens, Bas van Teylingen | 81 minutes | adventure, comedy | Actors: Dylan Haegens, Nick Golterman, Rico Verhoeven, Patrick Stoof, Ilse Warringa, Djamila, Buddy Vedder, Sterre Koning, Marit Brugman, Bibi, Jochem van Gelder, Giel de Winter, Karen Damen, Peter Hoefnagels, Amir Motaffaf, Teun Peters, Kelvin Boerma, Teske de Schepper

A movie by a YouTube star: can that be anything at all? Dylan Haegens dares to take on the challenge and comes up with his own film with the unsurprising title ‘De Film van Dylan Haegens’, in which he also plays the lead role, unsurprisingly. But that’s where it ends with little surprise, because the film is surprisingly fun.

In ‘De Film van Dylan Haegens’, the viewer is introduced to Haegens and his busy life as a YouTube personality and what it involves. His online videos, for example, are quite difficult and running a sandwich restaurant also consumes part of his time. IJsbrand is also introduced, Dylan’s “arch enemy” who wants to bother and imitate him as much as possible. From there, an adventure begins where Dylan threatens to lose all his followers by being inauthentic.

The nice thing about ‘De Film van Dylan Haegens’ is that despite his social media star status, Haegens does not take himself seriously. He doesn’t make himself bigger or more important than he is, a comment that is never far off when it comes to vloggers, if only because the vlog medium can foster a certain self-importance. That Haegens seems to suffer less from this is apparent from the fact that he more or less makes fun of the fact that losing all your followers is the worst thing that can happen to you.

The actors also visibly enjoy what they are doing and that is especially noticeable in the so-called villain IJsbrand, wonderfully played by Nick Golterman. He teeters on the edge of an exaggerated parody of a bad guy, but he always stays on the right side. Actually the only one who really acts over-the-top is Patrick Stoof, one of the few professional actors in the whole. But even that doesn’t bother. The film looks good, has good jokes and is also interesting as a phenomenon of the present time. So the sneer at television is a nice one. A group of people stand like living ornaments in IJsbrand’s house admiring a portrait of him. When they are allowed on a lunch break, Dylan asks why they are doing that. “We’ve all worked in television so we’re used to standing still all the time” is a pearl of an answer and typical of the battle that television seems to be losing to sites like YouTube. After all, it is an interesting fact that with ‘The Film of Dylan Haegens’ Haegens manages to make a new-fashioned target group enthusiastic again for an “old-fashioned” medium such as film.