One of Verhoven's best

Rating: Null/10 (23 September 2011)

One of the first "Foreign" films I ever saw was Verhoven's "Spetters" - And he is back now to his roots. With this movie it was as if 15 to 20 years of Verhoven's Big Hollywood movies never happened. Although in fact they did happen, giving Verhoven the experience to make this film great, done on a "shoestring" budget of only 16 million Euros, this film has the quality of a 150-Million dollar Hollywood movie.
I recognise most of these actors from films like 2004's "Downfall" and two versions of "Operation Valkyrie" that were done in the 2000's - The German actors are well cast as Nazis especially Christian Berkel as "General Käutner" and Sebastian Koch as "Müntze".
This film utilises the capacity of Europeans to speak several languages fluently, and there are English, Dutch, Hebrew, and German lines tossed out without any difficulty by the actors chosen. 3/4 of the dialogue is in Dutch, as this is a Dutch film revolving around events in that country toward the last days of WW-II in Europe.
Carice van Houten portrays a Jewish woman surviving in The Hague in Holland during WW-II. I don't know if van Houten is ethnically Hebrew, or not, but she sells her heritage well in this film, except where she is hiding that heritage.
The thing I kept forgetting with the amount of Nudity and Frank Sexuality in this film, was that this was not filmed in Hollywood, where the Ratings are hung up on such things. In that way, the storytellers were not repressed like they were when involved in US productions.
The story itself, which is shown in flashback after "Ronnie" (Halina Reijn) meets "Ellis" (van Houten) at the Kibbutz in Israel, begins with elements of any standard WW-II story. But from almost the beginning of the flashback, we see that things as shown in this film, are definitely not "standard" in any form. Who are bad guys are, is shrouded in a fog - We know there is a traitor, but our attention is constantly being shifted. The events in this film happen over a very short period of time and mostly over a three day period in The Hague. Random unfortunate events combine with deliberate sabotage and deception to cause some bad things to happen to a group of the Dutch Resistance. Which events were just bad luck, and which ones from diabolical trickery? The way this film plays out, is that we do not know until the very end of the film.
This makes Verhoven one of my favourite directors, I am very glad he made this film, it was very well cast, of comfortable length, paced well, and one of the best things about it was Van Houten's singing in three languages throughout the film. I say this to anyone: If you have not seen this, go out and get it right away if you can find it- It took me about three months to find a decent copy of it.