While Paul Verhoeven would strike Hollywood pay-dirt with 1987’s famously acid-spewing actioneer Robocop, his first English language production is in every sense an even more bilious distillation of the director’s blackhearted cinematic glee. This 1985 medieval anti-adventure is a film in which two of the would-be swooners in a nominal love triangle have their romantic “meet-cute” while two painstakingly-detailed, putrescent rotting corpses hang like Christmas tree ornaments on either side of them. The two living participants in the impromptu foursome are presently debating the merits of the mystical “mandrake root” the woman has found beneath the corpses, supposedly gifted with the power to ensure love at first sight for the two who eat from the flesh of the root. The man, who doesn’t even believe her, responds that the root’s powers are the result of the corpses dripping semen on the ground as they hang, a vicious circle where unceasing, unnecessary murder literally seeps into a would-be love that can only be taunted. I can think of no purer distillation of Verhoeven’s worldview.

One can hardly be surprised, then, that 1985’s Flesh + Blood failed at the box office. This is a downright dastardly production, a necrotic fable with Nietzschean disdain for notions of Medieval honor and an ironist’s smug, knowing detachment from the conventions of chivalry and triumph underpinning the mid-‘80s sword-and-sorcery film revival. Those films, so thick on the ground during the Reagan years, launder their noxious visions of self-centered masculinity and brutal, Aryan individualism in chimerical but hidebound frameworks of honor and duty. Flesh + Blood cuts those ideas straight to the bone. It assumes, both as a matter of course and philosophical first principle, that people are fickle, that love is transactional, that the bonds of brotherhood are suffused with brutal layers of power and potential for perversion, and that the only way to survive the world of the Middle Ages – and perhaps every moment that’s come after – is with a cruel conniver’s wit. In its cheekily mocking mood, this is a wickedly self-debasing anticipation of Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride from two years later. Verhoeven’s film looks on the backward-looking romanticism of the 1980s with impish, curdled disdain.

In a mode we might call post-modern medievalism, Flesh + Blood daringly opens by asking us to lament that our ostensible heroes are tricked out of the opportunity to rape and pillage for a day. Hawkwood (Jack Thompson), head of a band of mercenaries, leads a raid for a ruler named Arnolfini (Fernando Hillbeck), whose castle has been taken while he was away. After deciding to care for a nun he mistakenly skewers, Hawkwood turns on his mercenaries, who were promised a day of plunder. The rapacious soldier Martin (Rutger Hauer, fearlessly droll) becomes the new leader when they discover a statue of St. Martin, the only saint to wield a sword, just as the child of Martin and Celine (Susan Tyrell) dies. They bury the child in a wine casket near the statue’s muddy would-be resting place, and Martin knows how turn the momentary entanglement of death and life, heresy and sanctuary, into possibility. Power, in Flesh + Blood, is the circumstantial capitalization on the intersection of illusion and control.

In an ambush where they feign sobriety and saintliness, the mercenaries abscond with Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the would-be bride of Arnolfini’s son Steven (Tom Burlinson). While Steven initially has little actual interest in Agnes, Martin develops an attachment to her immediately, both because she is a resistant quarry, a woman willing to fight back and turn power and illusion back on him, and because she can bolster his sudden identity as a patriarchal head of household. An identity that always exists in tension with the more horizontal family life that the vagabond collective has heretofore lived by. As the story continues, the tensions within this crew of murderous crows fester as much as the battle between them and Steven and Arnolfini for the fate of Agnes.

This moral quagmire could have been filmed as a hellish apocalypse of ethical rot and interpersonal turpitude, and it is not not that. But the 2024 model viewer will kindly note Paul Verhoeven’s name on the marquee, knowledge that the 1985 model wouldn’t have had, and they shouldn’t be surprised that Flesh + Blood is a frisky, lascivious thing, a shifty skewering pitched like Monty Python’s Holy Grail lancing Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Or honoring both. With its devilish charm, Verhoeven’s film really does echo the mixture of frolicsome playfulness and social disquiet that defines Bergman’s earlier text, as well as its bodily awareness and earthen sweat, its appreciation for pragmatic, cosmic uncertainty and disdain for piety and dogma. You can detect an uneasiness about humanity beneath Verhoeven’s smirks of derision, an empathy for the loser and the loner and the makeshift possibility beneath its obvious nastiness. Throughout the war, the mercenaries give as good as they get, but none doll it out better than Verhoeven himself.

Except, perhaps, Agnes herself. Verhoeven’s film reveals an interest in the violence of power and desire beneath its bawdiest of jokes, as when Martin attempts to rape Agnes and she turns the tables on him by violently enjoying it, anticipating questions that Verhoeven would revisit thirty years later in 2016’s Elle. As the film progresses, Agnes emerges as its most cunning manipulator, a willing participant in her own abduction who willingly playing Steven and Martin off of one another, promising domesticity and turning both men into sudden parodies of honor and martial accord.

Both men had, before that point, been defined as essentially uninterested in love, with Verhoeven teasing out the linkages between Steven the empiricist scientist and Martin the ironist and skeptic. Both are untimely prophets of modernism, men who ride liquid currents toward modernity and evidence little respect for the sanctity of classical solidity. Yet Agnes turns them both into decidedly stable, settled beings, with Martin suddenly “play(ing) the fucking saint,” and in a brutally beautiful gesture on Verhoeven’s part, Steven finally constructing a weapon of war that the director frames as a woodwork phallus, a giant erection comically and overabundantly penetrating the castle walls.

Perhaps, though, Agnes merely reveals what the two men were all along. The scientist and the rogue may be more appealing social types to modern eyes than the saint or the king, but they are, after all, social types nonetheless. Each man is anchored to a particular vision of possibility allotted to them by the world around them, and Agnes exposes the limits of their will to escape that world. She uncovers the fixtures underpinning their masculine scaffoldings, their identities that seem to offer hope but only continue a circle of endless historical self-destruction that continues today. The genius of the film is that the two men, Hauer’s Martin especially, are doubles for Verhoeven’s own cinematic personality, beacons of a worldview that promises intellectual superiority, to see above the petty-small-minded violence of ideology, but ultimately only continues it in a mood of pitch-black mirth. In this cynical parable, Verhoeven’s casual, self-amused nihilism is the real killer. His gift to us is the knowledge that even his own solution, finally, is just more of the problem.

Score: 8/10