The 4th Man

Snapshot

The 4th Man (De vierde man) is Paul Verhoeven's last film made in the Netherlands before his move to English-language cinema, and it stands as the most stylistically concentrated work of his Dutch period. Adapted from a 1981 novel by the celebrated Dutch author Gerard Reve, it follows Gerard Reve — a Catholic, homosexual, alcoholic novelist who shares the author's name and much of his persona — as he drifts into a liaison with Christine Halsslag, a poised hairdresser and beauty-salon owner who has been widowed three times. Sensing danger, and increasingly gripped by hallucinatory religious visions, Gerard comes to suspect that Christine is a black widow who has killed her husbands, and that he is being groomed as the fourth. The film fuses the mechanics of the Hitchcockian suspense thriller with a dense weave of Catholic iconography, homoerotic desire, and dream logic, so that the audience — like the protagonist — can never be sure whether it is watching a murder plot or the paranoid projections of an unreliable mind. It is at once Verhoeven's most self-consciously "European art film" and a preview of the lurid, provocation-driven sensibility he would carry to Hollywood.

Industry & production

The film emerged from a specific and bruising moment in Verhoeven's career. His previous Dutch feature, Spetters (1980), had provoked an organized backlash in the Netherlands — accused of vulgarity, misogyny, homophobia and gratuitous violence, it drew a protest committee against the director. The 4th Man was made in this aftermath as a smaller, more controlled, more stylized project, and it functioned as a critical rehabilitation. Where Spetters was a broad social panorama, this was an intimate chamber thriller built around a handful of characters.

The production reunited Verhoeven with the collaborators who defined his Dutch output. The screenplay was written by Gerard Soeteman, Verhoeven's regular writing partner across Turkish Delight, Soldier of Orange and Spetters, adapting Reve's novel. It was produced within the Dutch film industry's modest financing structures of the era; precise budget figures are not something I can state reliably, but the film was clearly made on far less than Verhoeven's later international productions, and its intimate scale reflects that. Internationally distributed on the arthouse circuit — notably in the United States — it became a substantial critical success abroad, and that success is generally credited with opening the door to Verhoeven's Hollywood career, beginning with Flesh+Blood (1985) and then RoboCop (1987). In that sense The 4th Man is a hinge film: the end of one national career and the audition for another.

Technology

Technologically the film belongs firmly to the conventions of early-1980s European feature production: 35mm photography, conventional optical and mechanical effects rather than any novel process work. What distinguishes it is not new apparatus but the aggressive deployment of standard tools toward expressionist ends — heavily saturated color, in-camera and lab-controlled tonal manipulation, and practical effects for the film's shock imagery (blood, a graphic eye/wound motif, the recurring spider). The dream and premonition sequences rely on staging, lighting and editing rather than optical trickery, which keeps them tactile and unsettling. This is a film whose "technology" is essentially craft-based; there is no meaningful record of experimental technical processes, and it would be inventing detail to claim otherwise.

Technique

Cinematography

The photography is by Jan de Bont, later a Hollywood director of photography and then director (Die Hard, Basic Instinct; Speed, Twister), and it is central to the film's effect. De Bont gives The 4th Man a glossy, high-contrast, almost hyperreal surface, using strong color coding — particularly reds and blues — and pointed compositions that turn ordinary objects into omens. The camera repeatedly isolates portents (a key, scissors, a spider, the letter "S", ecclesiastical imagery) so that the visual field itself seems to be warning Gerard. The look is deliberately artificial and heightened, closer to the lacquered surfaces of a fashion image than to social realism, which suits a story about a man who cannot tell reality from prophecy. This decorative, slightly sinister sheen anticipates the seductive, glossy visual world de Bont and Verhoeven would later build in Basic Instinct.

Editing

The cutting works to sustain ambiguity. Premonitory flashes and hallucinations are intercut with the naturalistic present so that the viewer is caught, with Gerard, between literal and imagined events. The film builds suspense through Hitchcockian principles — showing the audience threatening details the protagonist may or may not have registered — and the editing modulates between the languid rhythm of the seduction and sharp, jolting inserts of violent or religious imagery. The result is a film that feels controlled and deliberate even as its content grows more delirious.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Verhoeven's staging is saturated with symbolic objects and Catholic iconography. Christine's home and salon become a field of clues: her collection of home movies of her dead husbands, the hairdressing that evokes the Delilah-and-Samson motif of the seductress who shears and destroys men, the crypt and church spaces where Gerard's visions erupt. Recurrent motifs — the spider and its web, the Virgin Mary rendered as an eerily maternal woman, blood, keys, mirrors — are woven through the décor so densely that the environment reads as the projection of Gerard's fevered, guilt-ridden Catholic imagination. The staging deliberately refuses to settle the question of whether these are objective signs or subjective delusions.

Sound

The score is by Loek Dikker, and it leans toward a lush, ominous orchestral register that underlines the film's operatic, doom-laden tone. Music and sound design work to elevate everyday moments into premonition, cueing dread around images that are, on their surface, mundane. Beyond the composer's contribution, detailed documentation of the film's sound design is thin, and I won't manufacture specifics; what is clear is that the aural texture participates in the same strategy as the image — dressing a realistic story in the trappings of nightmare and religious vision.

Performance

The performances anchor the film's tonal tightrope. Jeroen Krabbé plays Gerard as a witty, dissolute, self-dramatizing intellectual whose charm masks mounting terror; he must be simultaneously seductive, unreliable and sympathetic, and he holds the film's central instability in his body and voice. Renée Soutendijk, as Christine, gives a performance of cool, controlled opacity — glamorous, self-possessed, unreadable — that lets the character function equally well as genuine femme fatale or as the innocent screen onto which Gerard projects his fears. Thom Hoffman plays Herman, Christine's young lover, the object of Gerard's desire, embodying the erotic bait that draws the writer deeper into danger. The triangulated performances keep the film's core question — killer or fantasy? — permanently open.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The 4th Man operates in the mode of the subjective psychological thriller, told largely through the compromised perspective of an unreliable narrator. Its dramatic engine is dread rather than action: the audience is invited to read clues alongside Gerard and to share his growing conviction that Christine is a murderer, while the film withholds confirmation. The narrative persistently blurs premonition and event — Gerard is presented as a man who may have genuine second sight or may simply be a fantasist and alcoholic constructing a lethal story to inhabit. This structural ambiguity is the film's defining feature: it is built so that a literal, supernatural reading (the writer really does foresee death) and a psychological reading (a guilty, desiring man imagines a plot) remain equally available to the end. The mode is closer to the "fantastic" in the literary sense — sustained hesitation between the rational and the uncanny — than to the resolved whodunit.

Genre & cycle

The film sits at the intersection of several genres. It is a femme fatale thriller in the noir lineage — the black-widow woman whose lovers die, the man who cannot resist her — crossed with the psychological horror of visions and premonition, and inflected by an explicitly queer erotic dimension. It belongs recognizably to the Hitchcockian tradition, drawing on the master's grammar of guilt, doubling, blondes, and suspense-through-knowledge, while pushing the sexual and religious content far past anything Hitchcock could show. Within Verhoeven's own body of work it inaugurates a recurring type — the alluring, possibly murderous woman whose culpability is never fully settled — that he would return to most famously in Basic Instinct (1992), whose ice-pick femme fatale is often traced back to Christine Halsslag. In this sense The 4th Man is both a European art-thriller and the seed of a genre cycle Verhoeven would industrialize in Hollywood.

Authorship & method

The film is a Verhoeven work in its provocation, its fusion of the sacred and the profane, and its refusal of moral tidiness, but it is also a deeply collaborative product of his Dutch "repertory company." Screenwriter Gerard Soeteman, adapting Gerard Reve's novel, shaped the material's literary density and its ambiguity; the film's fidelity to Reve's Catholic-homosexual sensibility gives it a specificity Verhoeven's solo Hollywood provocations sometimes lack. Cinematographer Jan de Bont supplied the glossy, symbol-laden visual surface that is inseparable from the film's meaning. Composer Loek Dikker provided the ominous orchestral scoring. The film was cut by editors within Verhoeven's Dutch team, sustaining the crucial ambiguity between vision and reality. Verhoeven's method here is one of controlled excess: a rigorously constructed thriller framework loaded with as much religious, sexual and symbolic charge as it can carry, staged so that the audience is implicated in the protagonist's paranoia. It is Verhoeven at his most literary and most European, before the broader, more satirical register of his American films.

Movement / national cinema

The 4th Man is a landmark of Dutch national cinema and of Verhoeven's role in briefly making the Netherlands visible on the international art-film map. Alongside Turkish Delight and Soldier of Orange, it belongs to the run of Verhoeven–Soeteman films that constituted the most commercially and critically potent Dutch cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s. Its adaptation of Gerard Reve — one of the towering, and most transgressive, figures of postwar Dutch literature, and openly Catholic and homosexual — ties the film directly to a national literary culture and to Dutch debates about sexuality, faith and provocation. The film's international success also marked, in effect, the end of that national moment: Verhoeven, de Bont and others soon decamped for Hollywood, and Dutch cinema would not again command the same global attention for some time.

Era / period

The film is a product of the early 1980s, and it reflects the period's greater permissiveness around explicit sexuality — including frank, non-sensationalized homosexuality and bisexuality — that would have been far harder to stage a decade earlier and would soon be complicated by the AIDS era. Made in the wake of the Spetters controversy, it also registers the moment's arguments about the limits of provocation in film. Aesthetically it belongs to a period of glossy, high-color, design-conscious imagery that de Bont would help carry into 1980s and 1990s Hollywood. It is very much a threshold work of its time: the last gasp of a European auteur's national phase just before the transatlantic migration of European talent to American genre filmmaking that characterized the mid-1980s.

Themes

The film's themes are tightly interlocked. At its center is the femme fatale and the ancient anxiety she embodies — the seductive woman as castrator and destroyer of men, made explicit through the Delilah motif and through imagery of scissors and shearing. Catholicism runs throughout: guilt, sin, confession, martyrdom, and the doubled figure of the woman as both Madonna and destroyer, with the Virgin Mary appearing in Gerard's visions. Sexuality — specifically a fluid, desiring, homosexual and bisexual desire — is treated as both liberating and dangerous, the force that draws Gerard toward Herman and into Christine's orbit. Above these sits the theme of vision versus delusion: the artist as seer, and the impossibility of distinguishing prophecy from paranoid fantasy in a mind steeped in alcohol, guilt and faith. The film is finally about interpretation itself — about a man who reads the world as a text full of deadly signs, and about whether that reading is insight or madness.

Reception, canon & influence

Critically, The 4th Man was received far more warmly than Spetters, and it is generally regarded as the high point of Verhoeven's Dutch career and a redemption after that controversy. It performed strongly on the international arthouse circuit, especially in the United States, where its stylish blend of sex, religion and suspense found an appreciative critical audience; it was recognized with festival and critics' honors abroad. I want to be careful here rather than cite a specific award tally I cannot fully verify, but the consensus record is that the film's overseas success was decisive in launching Verhoeven's Hollywood career.

Looking backward, the film's influences are clear: Alfred Hitchcock's suspense architecture and iconography of guilt and doubling; the film noir tradition of the murderous seductress; and, crucially, the source novel and persona of Gerard Reve, whose Catholic-homosexual imagination supplies the film's specific texture. Looking forward, its most visible legacy is internal to Verhoeven's own filmography: the ambiguous, possibly-murderous blonde of The 4th Man is widely seen as the direct ancestor of Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, and the Verhoeven–de Bont collaboration on glossy, eroticized suspense carried straight into that later hit. More broadly, the film is credited as the vehicle that brought Verhoeven, de Bont, and the Dutch "sex-and-provocation" sensibility to Hollywood, where it would be reshaped into some of the defining erotic thrillers and satirical spectacles of the following two decades. Within Dutch cinema and within queer film history, The 4th Man retains a durable cult and critical standing as a singular fusion of the sacred, the erotic and the suspenseful — a small, dense film whose influence traveled much further than its modest origins would suggest.