Gijs Naber and Rifka Lodeizen effortlessly convince in ‘Judas II’ as the tormented brother and sister Holleeder

There’s a scene in it Judas II in which Astrid Holleeder (Rifka Lodeizen) and Peter R. de Vries (Mark Rietman) speak to each other at a remote location. Both are witnesses in the trial against Willem Holleeder (Gijs Naber), and both know that their lives are in danger. For Astrid Holleeder, played fabulously by Lodeizen, this has led to a permanent state of paranoia, with which she also infects her family, as a kind of wry mirror image of the terror that her eldest brother Wim has exerted on the family for years. Wim is not the only one targeting me, says De Vries, and he shows his now well-known tattoo, with the text: ‘On bended knee is no way to be free.’ Call it a tribute to De Vries, who was murdered by another part of the underworld in the summer of 2021.

The fate of De Vries, who in Judas II is aptly played by Rietman, gives a sharp edge to the events surrounding the trial against Willem Holleeder. The five-part series (again on Videoland) is based on the book Diary of a witness from Astrid Holleeder, which appeared in October 2017 as a follow-up to her bestseller Judas (whose first printing of 80,000 copies sold out in a day). Judas, book and series, had a greater dynamic. It was the story of growing up with the country’s most famous criminal as a brother and the way Astrid Holleeder tries to lead a life of her own, while the threat increases, culminating in a number of liquidations in the Amsterdam underworld.

In Judas II is Astrid a witness in the trial while her brother is behind bars. That is quite a challenge for Gijs Naber, who sits on a chair in a court of law for a large part of the series and sneers and rolls his eyes with maximum effect, like an exasperated Holleeder. But Lodeizen and Naber, who both won a Golden Calf in 2019, are so deep in their role that they easily convince.

Jude II shows that brother and sister are both imprisoned. Astrid in a kind of self-built prison of fear and paranoia, in which she also drags her family along. The makers (director Remy van Heugten and screenwriter Thomas van der Ree) take an interesting path, in which a parallel is drawn between the hold that Willem Holleeder had on the family and the later period in which Astrid Holleeder becomes estranged from her own family . Her daughter (Melody Klaver), for example, who wants to escape the clutches of first her uncle and later her mother: ‘Do I have to give up my whole life for him?’ That’s the common thread running through Judas II runs, over which the later fate of De Vries hangs like a kind of knife.