REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND Is a Surreal Spy Throwback (Review)

I love filmmakers who not only have a lane and stick to that lane, but find new and inventive ways to breathe life into that lane. Belgian writer-directing duo of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani shattered my cineaste brain at a film festival in 2013 with their giallo pastiche, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, a sensual and surreal series of paranoia, violence, and nudity. The pair’s love for Italian cult cinema from the ’60s and ’70s plus their fascination with pop-art stylings and loud, squeaky leather made them a must-watch pair for me. 2017’s Let the Corpses Tan took that mentality to the desert for a crime film with Spaghetti western aspirations. Their latest, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, sets their sights on spy capers, and it’s another glorious, hallucinatory trip.

Cattet and Forzani’s movies often receive the label “confusing,” which I suppose is warranted. They tend to focus on unfolding their stories intuitively rather than in a straightforward fashion. Their films are a vibe and you have to vibe with them to get it. If you watch movies entirely for plot, you’ll find yourself frustrated. But if you settle in to their pacing, their visuals, their soundscape—all perfectly and precisely executed—you can get the gist, which is really all you need.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond might be the pair’s most interesting and, dare I say, fun movie yet. It follows a retired spy (Italian genre legend Fabio Testi) living at a nearly empty hotel on the Riviera who believes his adversaries have resurfaced when his comely neighbor disappears. He begins a series of flashbacks to him as a younger man (Yannick Ranier) on missions involving stolen diamonds, the death of his lover/partner, and the female thief, Serpentik (Thi Mai Nguyen), who has alluded him for decades.

The flashbacks contain some delightfully weird gadgets, costumes, and surprisingly gory action set pieces. A clear and direct influence on the movie is Mario Bava’s comic book-based masterpiece, Danger Diabolik. But more than that, the directors took inspiration from those Diabolik comics and other Italian strips in the fumetti neri subgenre of crime stories. As with all their films, this replicates not the actual source material but the feeling of drinking heavily and dreaming about the source material.

The cutting back and forth between the present and the past is fast and unpredictable, like the movie itself is unstuck in time. This plays with one of the major themes of Reflection in a Dead Diamond‘s second half, which is the uncertainty of memory. Does our hero remember actually doing these things or does he remember acting in a movie about them? Or is it both? Is it neither? Eventually, the old spy meets a woman (Pulp Fiction‘s Maria de Medeiros) who may be the thief he’s looking for, but is the thief he’s looking for really a thief and is he really looking for her? Are you confused? GOOD.

In a lot of ways, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is a living comic book. But unlike a Marvel or DC movie, this attempts to dramatize the feeling of reading a comic book rather than take a comic book and adapt it into a movie. Reflection dazzles with one perfectly composed shot after another, with every bit of information one needs to know conveyed visually. Just in terms of Cattet and Forzani’s cinema, this feels closer to Strange Color, with its vivid colors and dreamlike logic, than Let the Corpses Tan, which for all its visual strangeness, still told a simple crime caper. I love them all, to be clear, but I think the pair have really outdone themselves here, both in terms of creativity and ambition.

I know a lot of people, especially the Shudder audience, will likely scratch their head at this one, but if you let the movie sink into your amygdala, I think Reflection in a Dead Diamond‘s strange magic will win you over. And if you happen to be a big fan of weird old Italian spy movies, all the better.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond ⭐ (4 of 5)

The movie hits Shudder Friday, December 5.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

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