The 4th Man

This highly touted Dutch sex suspenser proves once again that Europeans just can't make good thrillers. Either that or the sensibilities are different enough that I can't pick up the thread. This isn't a bad picture; it is fairly suspenseful, there is some violence, some gore, and parts of it are pretty erotic, but it just never quite caught fire for me. The atmosphere is appropriately dreary and menacing enough, but that's about all there is. Too much emphasis on fringe occult (i.e. precognition) weird dreams, (one of which is awful enough to give any male nightmares), and mysterious characters who come and go without explanation. Worse yet, the protagonist is an unappealing sot who looks like he needs a shampoo and a haircut (in fact, he actually gets one during the film, so I guess it was deliberate) so it is a little bit difficult to root for him. Last but not least, when the big denouement came it was sort of a gyp; there was a resolttion, but nothing we really wanted to know was revealed. It kind of reminds me of “Black Widow.” That picture was prettier, this one earthier.

The theme (women seduces and kills men--although in this picture we are never sure she killed them) is the same, but they both have that maddening tendency to refuse to bring things to a close, to set up audience expectations which are never fulfilled, and in many ways to leave us dangling. At the end I was left saying: is that it? How unintricate, how uninvolving, how all thoroughly superficial. Where's the catch, the snap, the pizzazz? Weird Europeans get me down. Directed, incidentally, by Paul Veerhoeven (or however the hell you spell it) who went on to later fame with “Robocop,” which I still haven't seen. Wonder how he survived the Atlantic crossing.