Jonathan Swift insisted his intention was not to entertain but to unsettle, “to vex the world rather than divert it”. Today, we have few satirists worth the name, few artists willing – let alone eager – to alienate audiences in order to nudge them into contemplating society’s hypocrisies and their own role in them. One film-maker, however, has made a career out of whipping away the upholstered chair of diversion to leave viewers nursing a butt-hurt sense of vexation: Paul Verhoeven. After a decade’s hiatus, he’s back on the big screen with Elle, a characteristically provocative rape-revenge drama laced with black comedy. And we need him more than ever.

Elle review: Paul Verhoeven's brazen rape revenge comedy is a dangerous delight Read more

To many, Verhoeven will forever be a brash trash merchant. Having established himself as the Netherlands’ most successful and controversial director, from 1987 to 2000 he delivered a series of American genre escapades that were more Hollywood than Hollywood. RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Starship Troopers and Hollow Man served up a double-faced vision of the US that was sensational and salutary, seductive and grotesque, mischievous and disturbing. Was this guy serious? No and yes. He was joking but meant it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest RoboCop’s far-fetched vision of corporate authoritarianism. Photograph: Allstar/Orion/Sportsphoto Ltd

His films’ outrageous sex and violence made them gratifyingly visceral spectacles or prime targets for moral outrage, depending on taste. Less obvious was the slyness with which they frustrated expectations around character, narrative and genre. Verhoeven’s films are radically uncertain, full of goodies who act badly and baddies who have a point, stories that collapse when tested like empty raincoats and voyeuristic thrills that make a point of making you queasy.

RoboCop wore its social satire on its metal sleeve, casually presenting a corporate dystopia rather like life today. Total Recall is more crafty. Its fantastical hero’s journey degrades into narcissistic delusion on closer inspection – but we aren’t obliged to inspect closely. Basic Instinct rubs our noses in its narrative games, challenging us to stand shoulder to shoulder with obtuse flatfoots or get into bed with a killer flirt. This cat-and-mouse game with audiences escalated until Verhoeven was defying us to reject the text of the film itself. How much evidence do you need to admit that Starship Troopers’ heroes are space Nazis? Or that the charismatic pioneer at the heart of Hollow Man is a snooping psycho stalker? And, once you have admitted it, how can you still enjoy the ride?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bloodthirsty animals do battle in Starship Troopers. Photograph: Channel 5

Still, if you were determined to ignore that nagging feeling that something was off, diversion could just about take precedence over vexation with those movies. But not when it came to Showgirls. That film pissed everyone off – apart from the people who embraced it as incomparably bad. Verhoeven took the opprobrium with a knowing smile but the truth is that Showgirls was too clear a mirror. It is a superlative satire of the meretricious underside of the American dream. It is a vulgar film about vulgarity. It is a clever and cohesive treatise on the way untrammelled capitalism breeds bad taste and violence and makes whores of us all. It shoved America down the stairs, and the American entertainment-industrial complex with it, and no one said thank you.

Showgirls is also a film about the contingencies and compromises that brutalised, traumatised, alienated women are forced to pursue in a profoundly misogynist world, how survival takes precedence over sympathy. This dynamic also informs Keetje Tippel, Verhoeven’s 1975 film about a young economic migrant in the 1880s; Black Book (2006), about a Dutch Jewish woman trying to make it through the second world war; and Verhoeven’s first feature since then, the much-acclaimed Elle, in which Isabelle Huppert brilliantly plays Michèle, a Parisian video game company CEO who responds to being raped by a home invader in ways rarely seen on screen.

Paul Verhoeven on Elle: 'It is not a rape comedy' Read more

Elle opens with a horrific attack to which Michèle reacts with unusual calm and control. Is she made of steel? Is she accustomed to trauma? Is something else going on? Does it matter that her work glories in phantasmagoric carnage? Around her orbit family members, friends, neighbours and colleagues – monstrous, flailing men, flawed mothers and failed Christians – slippery identities that embrace magical thinking and refuse unimaginable truths. “Is this real?” Michèle asks at one point, echoing the disorientation of an audience presented with flashbacks, fantasies and strange recapitulations. More than ever, Verhoeven leaves us to deal for ourselves with deeply troubling characters, actions and aesthetic forms.

Where does this appreciation for ambiguity and inconsistency come from? Verhoeven has spoken often about a childhood spent under Nazi occupation, witnessing brutality and victimisation but also having fun in the danger zone; discovering that fascists were sometimes kind and their enemies sometimes cruel; realising that, even amid great evil, what we call truth can shift with the circumstances.

This might sound like an argument for Verhoeven as a post-truth film-maker, a trickster who aims only to destabilise meaning. But I think it’s the opposite. There’s a difference between a troll and a satirist: both like to shock but the troll aims to provoke emotion and entrench existing views whereas the satirist aims to provoke critical thinking. There’s morality as well as mischief in Verhoeven’s insistence that we sit with the complex, the fluid and the inconclusive – the stuff not of diverting entertainment but of vexatious life. In these times of echo chambers, “alternative facts” and assaults on shared discourse, to champion reflexive criticality counts as a radical act. What kind of movie, one wonders, would Paul Verhoeven make about Donald Trump?