Horrorfest 2010: Les Diaboliques

This is another one I've heard of a bunch but never actually watched until now, another French horror film: LES DIABOLIQUES. It turned out to be one of those film experiences that are sometimes a little too rare, where you really don't know exactly what you're getting into as the movie unfolds. All I knew going into it was that it was about two women who conspire to kill a man who has wronged them. After that, I had no idea where it would go.

More specifically, the two women are Christina (Vera Clouzot) the fragile, weak and religiously obsessed owner of a boarding school and Nicole (Simone Signoret), a teacher at the school who seems to be tough and street wise. Christina is married to the headmaster of the school, Michel (Paul Meurisse) and Nicole is having an affair with him. The affair is no secret. Neither is the abuse Michel deals out to both women. Rather than being enemies, the two women bond over their mutual hatred and desire to escape from Michel, who runs the school with the same iron fisted sadism he uses against his wife and mistress. They hatch a meticulous plan to lure Michel away from the school and murder him, securing alibis for themselves and ultimately making the death look like an accident.

Most of the first half of the movie deals with the women putting this plan into action and the suspense and thrills come from wondering if the women will be able to go through with it, whether or not the plan will work out the way they want it to, and of course, whether or not they'll get caught. But by the time they've carried out the plan, only half of the movie has gone by, so you begin to realize this movie must have something else up its sleeve.

That's when the body disappears.

So -- I don't want to give away much more than that, other than the fact that the rest of the movie deals with the women spiraling into feverishly paranoid and guilty states as they attempt to figure out what's going on. Is this something supernatural? Did they not kill him? Is someone trying to blackmail them? At one point a retired detective (Charles Vanel) shows up, claiming that he's voluntarily looking into the case. Is he really trying to help, or does he have more sinister motives? And how much does he know?

Anything is possible up until the last few seconds of the movie, which is part of what makes this film so great. That last half hour or so builds so much tension and keeps so many questions unanswered and so many possibilities alive that even when you see some of the final chilling imagery, you're still not sure what's going on -- even if you know enough to be scared.

LES DIABOLIQUES has the interesting honor of being both inspired by Hitchcock while also having been said to inspire Hitchcock himself. You can see why, while watching the movie -- the themes Hitchcock loved are all there: the messiness of crime and murder, the fear of the unknown, characters building their own paranoid and guilty prisons in their heads. Like Hitchcock's characters, the characters in LES DIABOLIQUES simply too wrapped up in their own heads to be able to carry off a perfect crime.