Film · 1997 · Films · 1990s
Character
Scored from 49 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Mike van Diem's Dutch drama, adapted from Ferdinand Bordewijk's novel, is set in Rotterdam between the wars. Jacob Katadreuffe is the illegitimate son of Arend Barend Dreverhaven, the city's most feared bailiff, and Joba, the housekeeper who bore him and then refused every offer of marriage, raising the boy in near-silence and poverty. Working as a clerk at a law office while studying for the bar, Jacob finds each advance shadowed by his father, who buys up his debts and drives him toward ruin — apparently to break him, or perhaps to harden him. The story is told in flashback from a police interrogation following Dreverhaven's death.
Released in 1997, Character is a crime, drama and mystery film. It runs 1h 59m and carries an R certificate. It was made in the Netherlands, in Dutch.
Only 49 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 51 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 111 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Character lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1990s (4,082 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 49.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
