highest-grossing Dutch film of all-time with a gross of $1.7 million. Critical response The Seattle Times, in a rave review, wrote that the film is "confident and skillfully made" and "erotically charged (and graphic)," adding, Verhoeven has created an intricate, witty thriller about a writer's fears and paranoid imaginings and their possible fulfillment ... The director carefully steers a middle course that leaves you wondering at times if the woman is a witch, and at other times if the writer is just a victim of a morbid Catholic upbringing and a runaway imagination. Usually movies that take this approach (like Jack Clayton's delicately balanced masterpiece of ambiguity, The Innocents) are too frustrating to American audience expectations to become commercially successful. Yet The Fourth Man appears to have broken through that barrier to become one of the few profitable foreign films of the past year. Verhoeven makes the writer's suspicions so entertaining that his dreams and fantasies, which might just be premonitions, have a visual and psychological force that is actually stronger than the 'reality' of the other characters. The Philadelphia Inquirer called the film "highly charged" and enthused, "The Fourth Man falls into the general terrain occupied by the film noir, but it resists any label and – in its more lurid scenes – defies description. It is graphic in both violence and sex and most decidedly not for the squeamish ... Verhoeven's surface theme is the consequence of obsessive sexual desire, but the main undercurrent has to do with the vague line that separates fantasy from reality ... nothing is what it seems ... Verhoeven has designed the film in a way that keeps the viewer as off balance as the protagonist ... If there is such a thing as macabre wit, it can be found in the way Verhoeven treats his characters." In contrast, the Philadelphia Daily News wrote that the movie "is never as kinky or as funny as the character of Reve is. Its purple plot is beautifully lurid but the film itself is one step away from being brazenly lurid. It holds back." Pinsky, of DVD Verdict, thought the film to be "artsy to a ridiculous extreme. Saturated with images borrowed from symbolist and surrealist art, the film hammers the viewer over the head in every scene." However, he adds, "It is all much too much. And indeed it is supposed to be. Just as