Trainwreck: The Real Project X Review

“A whole bunch of idiots”

In 2012, a teenage girl in the small Netherlands town of Haren creates a Facebook event for her sixteenth birthday party, but makes the page public instead of private. Inspired by a love of the Hollywood movie Project X, Dutch teenagers make the event go viral, and soon thousands of people have RSVPed. Despite warnings, police and local authorities don’t seem to think anyone will turn up. No provisions are made to entertain the masses of young people who arrive in Haren, and the party soon explodes into a full-blown riot.

Director: Alex Wood

Executive Producers: Sheun Adelasoye De Nicola, Alexander Marengo, and Tim Wardle (Raw); Casey Feldman, Erica Roberts, and William Swann (BBH)

Cinematographer: Jean-Louis Schuller

Editing: Livia Serpa

Music: Matthew Davidson

Distributed by: Netflix

Release Date: July 8, 2025 Platform: Netflix

Project X is a 2012 teen comedy film in which three high school seniors throw a birthday party that gets wildly out of control. It was clearly inspired by a story that occurred in Australia in 2012, when Corey Worthington threw a party on MySpace, attracting over 500 people and sparking a vitriolic media storm afterwards. Trainwreck: The Real Project X isn’t about Corey Worthington; it’s about a ‘party’ that took place in a small Dutch town called Haren.

A sixteen-year-old girl makes the understandable yet small mistake of creating a Facebook event for her birthday and leaving it public. The understanding of social media was quite different in 2012, so it’s a relatively straightforward one to make. Nonetheless, some people decided to spread the invitations around until she had to close off the event out of fear, and then a group of idiots proceeded to recreate the event and continue sharing it, resulting in hundreds of Dutch teenagers showing up in this small town looking for a party. What they find isn’t a party, it’s just a bunch of police blocking off roads. They proceed to drink and blast music anyway, and it ends in a riot, causing a bunch of damage.

What’s disappointing is that there were so many times the events could have been stopped. Be that the people who kept creating the event and wanting to create a real ‘Project X,’ like in the Hollywood film, or even the Mayor refusing to offer an alternative for everyone coming to enjoy it instead. If the town had set up a party for them, they would have just gone there, and maybe the town could have made some money off this weird event.

The Trainwreck series has so far been a bit of an up-and-down cycle, but Trainwreck: The Real Project X has to be the most vapid of them so far, with no real story or anything of interest here at all. I feel bad for the girl, her family, and those in Haren, but not so much for the Mayor, who refused to listen to ideas on how to stop what took place. Nearly every person who is interviewed, however, is either one of the individuals who shared the event or someone who thought it was great to help spread it and participate.

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(Screener provided to Explosion Network.
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