Before making it big in Hollywood with hit films RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers, and not forgetting critically slated Showgirls, Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven was still making films in his native Netherlands, and this was the last before he left for the States, and one to feature in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Basically Catholic alcoholic and bisexual novelist Gerard Reve (The Living Daylights' Jeroen Krabbé) has frequent nightmares and visions of his possible impending or future death, but he tries to carry on as normal, leaving Amsterdam to the Vlissingen Literary Society to deliver a lecture, and on his journey he spots a handsome young man he is very attracted to, but he leaving on a different train. Following the lecture he is the introduced to the treasurer of the literature club and wealthy widow Christine Halsslag (Renée Soutendijk), also a beautician and the owner of the Spider beauty shop, and they have a one night stand, unaware that she already had a boyfriend, and in a photo he finds out it is the young man he saw in the train station. Gerard urges Christine should bring her boyfriend Herman (Thom Hoffman) so he can meet and spend some time with him, of course if he was to come for a few days his secret intention is to seduce the man he longs for. She agrees to this and leaves Köln to go and get Herman, while Gerard stays alone in her house, he just drinks whiskey and looks around her place, including inside a safe containing the film reel footage of her three previous marriages, and he finds out eventually that these three men all died while married to her. When Gerard does meet Herman, he first obviously questions her marriages and tells him that they simply all died in tragic accidents, but at one point while walking through a graveyard with Herman, and briefly seducing him, the two of them discover a secret crypt full of incriminating dark contents. Gerard is at that point sure that Christine is a Black Widow, i.e. a witch, and intends to marry Herman and perform some sort of dark spell so he will die in what looks like an accident as well, he could be "the fourth man", but the boyfriend thinks he is jealous and wants to scare him off and keep her for himself. They get into a bit of a squabble and drive recklessly, and they end up together in severe car accident, Herman is impaled through the eye with a pipe, but Gerard survives and is determined to prove Christine is an evil being and could kill him next, but in the end doctors catch him and believe him to be crazy, and he ends up in comatose and the nasty woman gets away with it. Also starring Dolf De Vries as Dr. De Vries and Geert De Jong as Ria. Krabbé gives a good leading performance as the sexual predator and unknowing victim of a dark series of witch crafted murders made to look like accidents, and Soutendijk is a suitable choice for the Femme Fetale who turns out to be some kind of sorceress with dark intentions, it is a simple enough story about doomed sexual desires and almost like a fatal attraction sort of vibe, but it does have the funny moments as well, it works as a fun black comedy thriller. Very good!
Review of The 4th Man
