To make a film on the Dutch resistance during World War 2 Paul Verhoeven has returned from his American sojourn to his homeland of Holland, where he had long ago played with the Hollywood aesthetic as well as with the topic of his new film before heading across the waters to make larger budget films. Now back home, Verhoeven has produced Black Book, his most Hollywood film yet. A surprisingly sober, twist-filled thriller about Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a Jew who dies her hair blonde “like Jean Harlow” and joins the resistance after her family is tricked and gunned down by nefarious collection of collaborators and Nazis, Verhoeven’s return to ambitious genre making after his last American film, the small-scale Hollow Man, is also surprisingly lacking that sardonic, undercutting humor so familiar to his best American work. Maybe the new sobriety is so that he can tell with as straight a face as possible a story of espionage and resistance that sees traitors and collaborators around every corner of The Hague. Or maybe, in this genre at least, subversive subtexts become highly textual, since the driving force of the film is its constant and continual revelation of new dangers, new enemies, new betrayals, and disturbing motivations. The treachery of society in wartime is itself enough of an edge, making a beautifully produced but altogether too smooth thriller more bitter than one initially suspects. Verhoeven has never so successfully put together a piece of serious entertainment, strong in pacing, thrills, and eroticism, but also one so slickly produced that it is difficult to see into the depths of the film.

With the ground shifting so often beneath the feet of Rachel—renamed Ellis for her work cozying up with Gestapo captain Müntze (Sebastian Koch)—the grip the audience has on trust, alliances, and friendships is powerfully tenuous. This ambiguity of relationships is centered on the usual commonality found between Ellis and the Gestapo agent after she throws herself into Müntze’s arms for the good of the resistance. Koch’s Müntze is sympathetic, yes (especially after recently appearing as the writer growing dissident in The Lives of Others), but Verhoeven and co-writer Gerard Soeteman are not interested in depth of character, exploring the humanity of evil, or the evil of humanity. We never learn what Müntze did in the past as a Gestapo chief, and instead what matters most is that Ellis, who has lost all her family to the Nazis, finds herself attached to Müntze, who himself lost his family to British bombs. Actions that initially appear virtuous—the seduction of Müntze to have a spy in the Gestapo, the escorting of hidden Jews across the frontier, the execution of a Gestapo chief—continually end up undermined by the revelation of who is really doing these acts, and why. Even though the plot on the surface is about a woman taking an active stance in the war by craftily using her sexuality, Verhoeven never makes things so straightforward. What are we to make of Rachel, in one of the film’s earliest scenes and before she dies her hair blonde, when she cheerily flashes her legs to whistling Wehrmacht troops? This is almost immediately after the German’s bombed the home of the family who were sheltering the Jewess. In the film’s most brilliant scene, Rachel prepares for her mission to seduce Müntze by facing a full-length mirror in order to dye her pubic hair blonde. Aside from basking in Houten’s nudity even as she disguises herself to sleep with the enemy (try to find the logic of the camera’s voyeurism of this scene), Rachel’s hand movements look like masturbation, until, that is, she cries out that the dye is burning her. The immediate solution? To sleep with Müntze’s resistance opposite, Akkermans (Thom Hoffman). Carice van Houten, in a terrific, sexy performance, masterfully mixes a playful and sometimes flippant sexual casualness with her deathly serious vendetta, and the existence of these two extremes lends Verhoeven’s film a grey area, one that initially is not apparent from Black Book’s sleek gloss, precisely in that nebulous wartime area of motivation. It is a grey area befitting an adventure film, erupting in contrasted behavior, action, and rationale rather than specifically in character.

Is Black Book really about this woman’s agency in utilizing her sexual appeal to propel herself through the war? At first, she uses her sex appeal for the purposes of vengeance, but as her attachment to Müntze grows it seems more like part of a matter of survival. Mind you, she is not using sex to survive; rather, what was part of a scheme eventually has become integrated into the way one lives. (Ellis is contrasted in a scene early in her deception with an alternate version of herself, played by Halina Reijn, as a redheaded secretary who has clearly created a cushy life by sleeping with the Gestapo for privileges—the scene has Ellis sing a German cabaret song and the redhead join her by the mic, gyrating grotesquely next to our elegant Ellis.) Likewise, betrayal becomes less an event, as it is at the film’s beginning when Rachel’s family is gunned down, than a regular part of the narrative of war. Yet the end of war itself this is not the end; cannily, the script looks beyond the end of World War 2 into the dangers of the immediate post-war—if not human society itself—where collaborators, cowards, vengeance, humiliation, and traitors are just as abundant as they were the day before the capitulation. This is why the film is named after an object whose importance is not introduced until the final fourth of the film, and object that, after the war, exposes the guilt of an unexpected resistance member. This may be the central betrayal of the plot, but it is far from an epic collaboration, and is one among many. Within the intricate series of reversals in the film—some in the form of betrayals but more often than that taking the form of hindsight surprise over the way Verhoeven and Soeteman have cleverly laid out the plot—the conventional revenge narrative, with its driving motif of the bodies that fall in the struggle and what they motivate the survivors to do, becomes murky in the smoke and mirrors of society’s ambiguous motivations for violence. This is because the betrayals are less surprising in the form of someone who one thought was good turning out to be bad, than they are for when a good action accomplished turns out to have been done for completely different reasons. Now the actions that were so important to the film in defining the morality of characters and of the world are, shockingly, less important than the reasons for the action. This brings a level of sophistication to Black Book that is not initially evident through Verhoeven’s depersonalized, though very elegant filmmaking. For all one knows, Müntze did horrible things in the past, and Ellis’ love for him is socially wrong (we catch glimpses of the women, their heads shaved publicly, who slept with the enemy during the war), but the reasons behind their attraction are human and understandable. In America Verhoeven thrived using genre cinema to get at the harsh, brutal social motivations driving those cinematic forms. In Black Book these driving undercurrents are all on the surface, as the espionage thriller revels in deception and betrayal. Exploding powerfully on this surface, Verhoeven’s use of genre sadly no longer seems exploratory, and what it has in a thrilling, in-your-face, brutal smoothness it also lacks in a consideration of undercurrent, subtlety, and a complexity within.