Paul Verhoeven: Satire, Sex, and Violence

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0000

The most reliable way to misread Paul Verhoeven is to take him at his word. He hands you a fascist military recruitment ad and lets you cheer. He hands you an advert for a corporate police state and lets you laugh at the bad guys without noticing you have become one. For decades a large slice of his audience watched his films straight, and the confusion is the closest thing he has to a signature. Here is a director who spent a career building glossy, expensive machines that flatter the very appetites they are dissecting.

The Vanishing (Spoorloos): The Ending That Ruined Sleep

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

There is a small class of films that people warn each other about the way they warn about a cliff edge. Spoorloos — released internationally as The Vanishing — is at the front of it. George Sluizer’s 1988 Dutch-French thriller, adapted by Tim Krabbé from his own novella The Golden Egg, spends most of its running time as a patient study of loss and obsession, and then closes on an image so bleak that people who saw it once in the late eighties will still tell you they never quite got over it. It is a horror film that contains almost no horror-film furniture. No mask, no score stabbing at you, no monster. Just a service station in the sun, a man who will not stop looking, and a chemistry teacher with a hobby.

Dutch Cinema - vo.rs

Paul Verhoeven: Satire, Sex, and Violence

The Vanishing (Spoorloos): The Ending That Ruined Sleep