SOME people just want a simpler life. Look at Paul Verhoeven. The Dutch director left Europe in the mid-1980s and went to live in America on a junk diet of violence and sex. He proved it was possible to get by. He thrived on high-concept blockbusters such as RoboCop and Total Recall, establishing his sci-fi thriller credentials. He even had the temerity to mock the genre in Starship Troopers. Then he undid himself with low-brow romps such as Basic Instinct and Showgirls. They did little but uncover a prurient hunger for nude women that he had hinted at in earlier work. With 2000's Hollow Man, you could say the director was in decline.

Now Verhoeven has turned his back on America (or is it that America has had enough of him? ) and, at 68, has hit form again.

Black Book, his first European film in 20 years, takes his signature themes of violence and erotic charge and merges them into a complex and ambiguous second world war revenge thriller about a Jewish woman who will do whatever it takes to survive.

Carice van Houten's performance as the leading lady is delivered with formidable pluck and charm. Her character could seduce her way out of a corner by just twinkling her blue eyes. But the humiliation she endures would make Hitchcock look like a real ladies' man.

Van Houten plays Rachel Steinn, a beautiful Jewish singer silenced by the war and in hiding on a farm by a lake. But we first see her at a Kibbutz in 1956 when a woman from her past walks into her classroom. Memory surges up like an old nightmare - we will learn later that both women slept with Nazi commanders to conceal their Jewish identity - and the film then swings back to Holland in 1944. Steinn is sunbathing by a lake. She lures a man towards her on his yacht but the moment is shattered. An allied bomber with a smoking engine flies in low and drops its bombs on the farm, destroying the safe house.

It could almost be a flashback to Verhoeven's war-time childhood which he claims was full of such incidents. The moment is the first of many swift pirouettes - the film never once allows you to rest on the soles of your feet. A shadowy policeman offers her escape across the channel, but when she joins her family and the other rich Jews who can afford the passage, they are snared by SS troops. Steinn escapes overboard, but the rest are gunned down in cold blood - their bodies plundered for loot.

She survives by joining the Dutch Resistance. They change her name to Ellis de Vries and put her undercover. Her hair died Aryan blonde, she sings 'Lola' for a rowdy Nazi soiree. The SS man who butchered her family (played with nasty relish by Waldemar Kobus) accompanies her on piano. Nazi commander Ludwig Muetze (Sebastion Koch) suspects she is not a gentile, but takes a tumble for her charms anyway.

Centred on the Dutch experience of the war, the film's moral compass becomes cloaked in a delicious noir-like fug. What would normally be filtered as right and wrong, Allies versus Axis, becomes a stew of multiple double-crossing and backstabbing. Here, the Dutch are out for themselves. The Resistance is shot through with traitors. The Germans have their noble men and the female body is traded blithely like chocolate and sugar.

Black Book (named after the list of wealthy Jews deceived by conspirators) is based on true events. Despite its moral haziness, collaborators are singled out for justice and the film serves as a serious indictment of certain Dutch behaviour during the war.

Verhoeven first researched this story 30 years ago, but along with scriptwriter Gerard Soeteman, has taken until now to deliver it (their last joint effort was 1977's similarly-themed Soldier of Orange). The result is an assured, slippery thriller, with the kind of satisfying intelligence found wanting from the Dutch auteur's Hollywood work. It is a dark treat.