Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
The cruel and abusive headmaster of a boarding school, Michel Delassalle, 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 Delassalle's corpse mysteriously disappears.
Diabolique is a masterwork of suspense that virtually defined the twisty psychological thriller genre. However, per the rules, I cannot award all fives — the least exceptional category relative to the film's other towering achievements is Novelty: while the film was extraordinarily original for its time and hugely influential, its basic 'murder gone wrong' skeleton is a well-worn noir framework, and decades of imitators have slightly dulled its singularity. Everything else is genuinely exceptional: the plotting is a precision instrument of dread, the performances (especially Clouzot's direction of Signoret and Vera Clouzot) are riveting, the black-and-white cinematography is oppressively atmospheric, and the ending remains one of cinema's great shocks. Novelty is held to 3 not because the film isn't distinctive — it absolutely is — but because it is the one dimension where other categories genuinely surpass it.