Diabolique (1955)

Please don't spend money on this.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

. . . of this often mislabeled flick. If you cut out the groaning toilets, bellowing pipes, thundering bath tubs, and plugged up pools gurgling throughout DIABOLIQUE, you wouldn't have much of a movie left. As the plot takes its characters from city to village to last chance gas station all around France, the one constant here is lavatory facilities that no doubt date back to the Era of Napoleon (if not Charlemagne). Should anyone in a large building unleash a loo, the resulting racket proves ear-shattering for folks several floors or hallways removed. Tubs are even worse, easily drowning out the din made by lawn mowers or revving jet engines, as these "Moaning Myrtles" register 150 decibels plus. It's not too hard to understand why the average French swimming pool is filthier than the waste tank at a pig farm, given the lacking of being drained after their initial installation. DIABOLIQUE documents why no one from Nice to Dunkirk dare empty a natatorium, because the ensuing cacophony is enough to literally raise the dead. My brother-in-law is a master plumber, and he tells me that his French counterparts are eligible for "Poolitical Asylum" in the U.S.

I'm not generally given to superlatives and was quite taken by the number of reviewers here who make the claim for "Diabolique" as the most suspenseful film of all time. I too actually thought it was very good with a caveat that comes with the finale of the story which I'll get to in a bit. Director Clouzot really did a masterful job in extending the long exposition of this mystery. If one is fully engaged in the story, it's like chomping at the bit to figure out what's going on with the missing corpse from the pool and unexplained sightings of Michel Delassalle after he'd been 'murdered'. One should probably be able to see the twist coming, and maybe you could in another film, but this is one that plays on one's imagination in a way that blinds you to the eventual outcome. I thought it was just magnificently done.The thing that bothered me about the ending are twofold. In the first instance, even if Michel (Paul Meurisse) and his lover Nicole (Simone Signoret) did manage to scare the frail Christina (Vera Clouzot) to death, what would be the basis for retired police commissioner Alfred Fichet (Charles Vanel) to arrest him for? Scaring someone to death to my mind seems more like conjecture than a chargeable crime. Who could prove it? Even though Fichet overheard the conversation between the conspirators, I don't see why a sharp lawyer couldn't put the blame on Christina's easily confirmed medical history and recent weakened condition.The other issue comes courtesy of the young boy Moinet (Yves Marie-Maurin) who was disbelieved by all who heard him state that he saw the school principal after he disappeared. When he says he 'saw' Christina after she collapsed and was presumed dead, there was no confirmation in the story to prove the point. I'll grant that it was a good hook to keep the viewer guessing, just as it was the first time with Michel's 'murder'. But with former cop Fichet on hand, and school personnel around who would have to have removed the body, wouldn't it have to be established that she was actually dead? If one presumes so, then the scene with Moinet is a moot one.One thought I had while watching was that this would have been a good film for Alfred Hitchcock to take under his wing, and was pleasantly educated by a handful of reviewers who stated that he missed getting the script for this film by a whisker. "Diabolique" was certainly worthy of a Hitchcock treatment, as I found it better than some of his venerated films like "Strangers on a Train" and "Shadow of a Doubt". If one disregards some of my earlier critique, I think it holds up as a pretty suspenseful thriller that keeps you guessing right till the very end.

Since the age of 6, I've lived in the village where the school scenes were shot (that castle was at the time abandoned and Clouzot wanted to buy it to get his studios inside, but it was too expensive, now it's the Town Hall since 1968). Each time I went to school (not the movie's one), I kept thinking of that horrific movie and when I saw it at 15, I was quite impressed, discovering Clouzot's Noir filmography.Like the townspeople watching at the shooting and how the beautiful castle had become sinister, full of mud all around. During the shooting since three weeks, all the team was completely sad and sinister, shooting night and day. They got more joyful when eating in the local restaurants. A lot of villagers came at the gate to watch with excitement all the famous team shooting one of the most well known classic thrillers. Clouzot never shot again in that village, and no other movie was shot there.

LES DIABOLIQUES is a spooky and intense classic from France, a psychological thriller in which a pair of women decide to kill a bullying and controlling school headmaster. One of them is his wife, the other his mistress, and both hate him for good reason. Their plot goes to plan but the psychological toll of what they have done weighs heavy on them, compounded by further mystery when the body goes missing.There's very little to dislike about this classic movie which has a sheen of quality to it. The expert direction draws out the suspense of the situation without resorting to jump scares or sinister music; the camera-work is very fine and the slow-moving nature of the narrative allows you to become fully immersed in the realism of the piece. The actors are exemplary, as you would imagine, and the film features some quite wonderful ghastly set-pieces involving corpses rising from baths and the like. That it is still frightening when seen today says plenty.LES DIABOLIQUES is also an influential movie; try watching Hitchcock's PSYCHO and in particular Kubrick's THE SHINING afterwards, you can see this film's fingerprints all over them. The Shaw Brothers studio even went ahead to make their own, even more involved spin on the story, the quite wonderful HEX which turns out to be very nearly every bit as entertaining as this film, albeit in a quite different genre. Horror and thriller fans will be in their element with this outstanding lesson in movie-making.