DIABOLIQUE (1955)

This is a movie discussion group. While participants usually arrive having watched the film beforehand, you are invited to come and listen if you haven't seen the film yet.

"The cruel and abusive headmaster of a boarding school is murdered by an unlikely duo -- his meek wife and the mistress he brazenly flaunts. The women become increasingly unhinged by a series of odd occurrences after his corpse mysteriously disappears."

DIABOLIQUE (1955)
Original title: Les diaboliques
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jérôme Géronimi, René Masson and Frédéric Grendel
Based on the 1952 novel “Celle qui n'était plus” (She Who Was No More) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
With Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse and Charles Vane
1 hour 57 mins.
In French with English subtitles
Violence rating: low
Available to stream on Plex, Watch TCM, The Criterion Channel, The Roku Channel, Max and Max-Amazon Prime, and to rent on Amazon. Check justwatch.com for details.

The novel “She Who Was No More” was such a hot property that apparently Clouzot beat out Hitchcock by mere hours in purchasing the rights. (Boileau and Narcejac went on to write the novel that became the basis for “Vertigo,” so Hitch won that particular race.) And in this case, the movie lived up to the hype, thrilling audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The film essentially invented the jump scare and double (triple?) twist, which has been replicated endlessly since. It did, however, switch the genders of two of the three players in this bitter “love triangle,” so while the novel is built around an explicitly lesbian relationship, the film removed the overtly queer material. But as it is often seen as homoerotic in its own right, is the ghost (or missing corpse) of the foundational story bedeviling the film, or does its have its own queer qualities? Heterosexual bonds are portrayed as brutal and manipulative, making one wonder if the tone would have been different with the lesbian relationship intact. Either way, this is a brilliantly executed, foundational text of the modern horror-thriller genre that cannot be missed.