Like Tears in Rain review – Blade Runner’s Rutger Hauer as we’ve never seen him

How do you like your Rutger Hauer: playfully wicked or wickedly playful? The late Dutch actor was such an impressive physical presence – tall, blond, blue-eyed and strong-chinned – that he could command the screen without saying a word. But what made him magnetic was the inescapable feeling that something was bubbling away under that seraphic surface. Some actors are happy just to be gazed upon and admired. Hauer always seemed to be looking right back at the audience: sometimes hawk-like, often just self-amused. 

So what was this mercurial actor really like behind the scenes? Until recently you could have told me he was a practising warlock in his downtime and it would have seemed entirely plausible. The new documentary Like Tears in Rain – lifting its title from his climactic cyber-elegy in 1982’s Blade Runner – paints a rather more grounded picture of a lifelong artist, loving husband and unexpected camper van devotee.

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Like the recent Bafta-winning Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story and the jovial Roger Moore snapshot From Roger with Love, it is a film that benefits enormously from a vast personal archive of candid footage. Actors in the 1980s seemed to love buying high-end camera equipment and documenting their lives. Hauer took it to an even greater extreme, recording impromptu video diaries throughout his life. 

It is during one such aside that he conspiratorially shares how he cracked the code of film acting after training for the stage in Amsterdam (a theatrical education punctuated by a stint in the Dutch merchant navy at 15). Early on he decided “the camera is my friend”, and that instinct informed his approach for the rest of his career. 

It certainly made him a compelling villain – although you could argue Blade Runner’s rogue replicant Roy Batty is justified in raising hell at the soulless corporation that imposes an arbitrary four-year lifespan on their intergalactic slave labour.

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It is harder to make the case for Hauer’s title character in 1986’s The Hitcher, a malevolent killer haunting dusty Texas highways who seems to delight in tormenting the young dork who offers him a lift. Whatever their morality, Hauer’s characters often feel otherworldly, uncanny, something more than just man.  

It seemed to rub off in real life too. When he was making Hollywood in-roads in the 1980s Rutger Hauer had the ready-made mystique of being extremely European, even if his impatience with banal questions seemed to unnerve the US entertainment media. Here in the UK, of course, that enigmatic aura was burnished by Guinness in the Pure Genius ad campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a series of lofty and surreal vignettes, the impish Hauer seemed entirely at ease, not so much the face of the product as the black-suited, platinum-maned embodiment of it.

Like Tears in Rain, compiled and directed by his goddaughter Sanna Fabery de Jonge, has no shortage of famous faces keen to talk about a friend they clearly adored. Fellow thesps Vincent D’Onofrio and Mickey Rourke – both fairly intense characters themselves – can barely contain their fanboy admiration of his poise and talent.

But just as their hero would recharge at home even as his career was taking off in the 1980s, Fabery de Jonge (who can be glimpsed as a young girl in much of the vintage footage) keeps returning to Hauer’s tight circle of bohemian friends and his artist wife Ineke ten Cate for insights.

The deeply personal perspective adds some useful context to his work. The Ronseal-titled Flesh and Blood from 1985 always seemed to me like a sword-swinging romp where Hauer and his long-time collaborator Paul Verhoeven were having some transgressive fun at the expense of Hollywood investors. But via video diary we see how lonely and unhappy Hauer was during a production he was contractually obliged to complete. It fractured a 15-year friendship, and lifelong provocateur Verhoeven seems uncharacteristically contrite about the whole thing.

Rutger Hauer died at the age of 75 in 2019, the same year that bleak future-noir Blade Runner was set. That cosmic coincidence allows this documentary to end while celebrating the actor in his true imperial phase: who would ever tire of hearing him deliver that deathless sci-fi soliloquy?

But it is a truly multi-faceted portrait of an artist who was innately gifted but constantly restless. Time to dip back into Hauer’s sprawling filmography to see what mischief you may have missed.

Like Tears in Rain is streaming now on Viaplay UK, a Prime Video channel add-on.

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