Black Book is not a Hollywood Paul Verhoeven film. The director of Basic Instinct, Total Recall, Robocop, and Starship Troopers has returned to his native Holland and crafted a powerful and intriguing story of love, honor, and betrayal in the waning months of World War 2. Carice Van Houten plays Rachel Stein, a young Jewish woman whose hiding place in the Netherlands is destroyed. Narrowing escaping a massacre at the hands of the Nazis, she joins a cell of the Dutch resistance as Ellis de Vries. As Ellis, she befriends a Nazi officer and gets a job working with the German occupiers. While she works to gather information for the resistance, she runs the risk not only of discovery by the Nazis, but also the risk of being seen as a collaborator by her countrymen after the war.
In a movie packed with plot, the best-laid plans of both the resistance and the Nazis always seem to be foiled. The spies on the resistance side are known, but it is clear that there are also spies for the Nazis. The web of betrayal amid the brutality of the war and the struggle of Ellis and her fellow countrymen to maintain a sense of humanity is at the heart of the movie. The brutal stress of the war exposes ugly fractures between people, as some betray their beliefs for personal gains while subtle prejudices in others flare up into brutal violence. The story of Ellis’s journey through the last months of the war is gripping as a thriller, and is told against a compelling historical backdrop.
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