Black Book (2006)

Paul Verhoeven returned to the Netherlands after two decades in Hollywood and made a film about a Jewish singer who survives a massacre, joins the resistance, seduces an SS officer, and discovers that nearly everyone around her is for sale. The engine here is betrayal, and it runs without moral instruction. Rachel Stein, played by Carice van Houten with a composure that borders on the unnerving, has agency, intelligence, and a full interior life, which is more than most wartime heroines are granted. The film never pauses to congratulate itself for this. It simply proceeds.

Verhoeven has said he wanted no obvious moral contrast between his characters, and he means it. The resistance men are petty, cowardly, and murderous. The SS officer is courteous and weary. The liberated Dutch crowd beats its own women in the street. This is a revisionism of the older, less comfortable variety: it punctures a national myth of heroic suffering and leaves the puncture open. The persecution of Dutch Jews is rendered as catastrophe and fact, not as a lesson aimed at a modern audience. The stolen gold and jewels function as a plot device, the object everyone chases, not as an argument about capital.

What the film does not do is lecture. There is no checklist, no sermon, no character standing in for a thesis. It is a thriller, assembled with craft, and it trusts the audience to sit with ambiguity. A lesser production would have told us what to feel. This one, to its credit, declines. The frame device, Israel in 1956 with sirens in the distance, offers no resolution, only a shrug toward the next conflict.