Berlinale Review: Reflection in a Dead Diamond is a Feverish, Visceral Assault on the Senses

Positive or not, all critical appraisals of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s films inevitably land on the same talking point: their inordinate cinephilia. Rightly so: the Belgian duo’s filmography––an oeuvre now spanning four features and a handful of shorts––teems with nods to a seemingly endless cascade of Italian giallos from the likes of Mario Bava, Sergio Martino, and Dario Argento. You can call that an act of “cinematic rehabilitation,” as Justin Chang once wrote in his review of Let the Corpses Tan––though perhaps that’s only apt to ring true if you think that particular blend of hyper-stylized pulp needs rehabilitating in the first place. Hence the rather simplistic argument: fans of the classics Cattet and Forzani invoke will undoubtedly relish their works while everyone else likely writes them off as hollow tributes––or, to borrow from Stephen Holden’s far less generous take on their 2009 Amer, “recycled psychosexual kitsch.”

If the either-or debate feels especially asphyxiating, it’s because it presupposes that only giallo connoisseurs will be able to luxuriate in the pleasures Cattet and Forzani conjure. But those charms are not scholarly. Rather than mere regurgitations of vintage titles, their films ooze a seductive power that’s entirely their own––not to mention an insouciant disregard for plot conventions that can make watching them akin to getting stuck in a whirlpool where the basic laws of physics and narrative don’t apply.

Enter Reflection in a Dead Diamond. Set in an unidentified stretch of southern France, the same Mediterranean backdrop that housed Amer and Corpses, Diamond centers on a seventy-something retired spy, Monsieur Diman (Fabio Testi), whose sojourn at a luxurious seaside hotel is suddenly interrupted by fears his old enemies might be after him again. That’s a very succinct way of distilling what is, in fact, an impossibly intricate diegesis, a Russian Doll of stories within stories within films. Diman’s younger, James Bond-esque self (Yannick Renier), whose gruesome missions keep intersecting the old man’s retreat in rivulets of flashbacks, is not a real spy, but a character of some B-movie espionage saga, one “John D.” Which is to say that the increasingly violent memories Diman is exhuming in-between martinis may have less to do with actual, real-life experience than delusions around his own fictional alter-ego. 

Then again, Diamond has such little interest in logic that teasing out the difference between real life and hallucinations would miss the point. Anyone familiar with Cattet and Forzani’s oeuvre will know the kind of thrills their films unfailingly elicit. For newcomers, the encounter might amount––I say this as the highest of compliments––to an assault to the senses. Like its predecessors, Diamond unfurls as a sort of feverish mirage. It’s a film where the camera seldom stays still, shots rarely last more than five seconds, and the frame keeps splintering with the same orgasmic joy that characters experience whenever stabbing or slashing through human flesh (which happens a lot). Manuel Dacosse, who’s shot all the couple’s previous features, works with a palette that’s drenched in lurid crimsons and blues, toggling between extreme close-ups of eyes and mouths redolent of Spaghetti Westerns and Argento-styled shots of blades and stilettos tearing through skin. This is a film where the camera need only tilt skyward and back to earth for the story to shift from present to past, one fiction to the next. There are images culled from nightmares––a giant millipede crawling over a corpse––and others that are almost disarming in their inventiveness, such as an evening dress worn by one of John D’s female associates made entirely of sequins the size of a two-euro coin that can dart in all directions like scintillating daggers, killing everyone in their wake.

That’s another thing that’s often overlooked in critical debates around Cattet and Forzani: their films’ playfulness. Diamond is––despite or maybe because of all the blood and narrative somersaulting––a profoundly funny watch. Which is why I’m so hesitant to use the word homage. At one level that’s technically what this is, but the kind of tributes Diamond offer are not reverential. You can feel the directors having fun as they provoke and dissect ur-texts spanning giallos to seminal Italian comic books like Diabolik. And their glee is contagious. The sight of Maria de Medeiros, who struts into Diamond as Diman’s old flame, recalls a filmmaker she once worked with, Quentin Tarantino, another director who’s hardly shied from homage himself. But while in Tarantino’s cinema the nods to other revered auteurs can often register with a self-congratulatory ah-ah! (not unlike an instantly memefied moment from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), Cattet and Forzani have a way of turning their cinephilia into something welcoming. Diamond isn’t a film that will shame you for not catching everything in its Warren Commission-sized list of references, though it might encourage one to brush up knowledge of the cinema it speaks to, which is all for the better.

Does it amount to much beyond pastiche? This is the final point all reviews of Cattet and Forzani’s projects eventually arrive at, and again the question feels misplaced. Diamond is much more than the sum of its sizzling parts; for all these hat tips, the film emerges as its own shapeshifting oddity. At a time when festivals are increasingly flooded with far-flung productions that all feel crafted from the same mold, here’s a film that manages to be both familiar and completely different, a work of visceral pleasures uninterested in genuflecting to rules or expectations. 

Reflection in a Dead Diamond premiered at the 2025 Berlinale and will be released by Shudder.

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