Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The 4th Man
1983 · Paul Verhoeven · The 4th Man on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for objects the camera lingers on: a key, scissors, a spider. (camera)
De Bont keeps isolating ordinary items in tight, pointed compositions, turning them into portents Gerard can't stop reading as warnings.
Payoff: The camera makes you read the room the way Gerard does, as a text full of possible signs. In the reading: the readable image. This is what the reading calls a lectosign: an image that has to be read and deciphered rather than simply looked at.
Notice the heavy red and blue color coding throughout. (light)
De Bont pushes the palette toward glossy, hyperreal reds and blues, closer to a fashion image than to ordinary Dutch daylight.
Payoff: The heightened color tells you not to trust this as a straightforward, realistic world.
Watch Krabbé play charm and mounting terror at once. (performance)
Gerard is witty, dissolute, and self-dramatizing, and Krabbé holds seductive and unreliable and sympathetic together in the same performance without tipping into any one of them.
Payoff: You can never fully trust his version of events, and the performance is built to keep it that way.
Watch Soutendijk's face for what it refuses to give away. (performance)
Christine is played with cool, controlled opacity, glamorous and self-possessed, a surface that works equally well as femme fatale or as an innocent woman.
Payoff: The film never lets her face settle the question the plot keeps asking about her.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch every object the camera isolates: a key, scissors, a spider. Decide for yourself if they're warnings or just objects.