Diabolique (1955) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / November 6, 2014

“Don’t tell them what you have seen,” is what director Henri-Georges Clouzot put at the beginning of his film Diabolique, basically telling you not to spoil the film to your friends. It’s precisely this statement that sums up the entire film. Like many thrillers that succeeded it (The Usual Suspects springs to mind), this film is all about the ending and everything that precedes it is mere foreplay.

“Don’t be devils! Don’t ruin 

the interest your friends could take 

in this film. Don’t tell them 

what you have seen. 

On their behalf, thank you.”

            The action takes place in a boarding school. The headmaster is a bit of an a-hole and so his wife, Christina, and his mistress, Nicole, conspire to kill him. Pretty basic setup, right? The mistress comes up with a plan which they execute to perfection. The wife lures him to Nicole’s apartment a few hundred kilometers away from the school. There, Nicole sedates him and they drown him in a bathtub. They then transport his body back to the school and dump it in the school pool. They’re confident that when the body floats to the surface, people will think it was an accident of some sort. Well, that was easy, right? Except the body doesn’t surface and when the pool is eventually drained, there is no body to be found. Even worse, several of the school’s kids claim to have seen the headmaster. This launches a series of events where Nicole and Christina try to get to the bottom of this whole mystery.

            As I said in the beginning, this film is all about its climactic plot twist. Everything is but the journey towards it. The journey is at its best when presenting you with strange mysteries, like the blurry school photo where the presumed dead headmaster may or not be in. (This may be the scene where Antonioni got his inspiration for a similar scene in 1966’s Blow-Up.) But in many scenes, the film tends to drag which is only worsened by the film’s 2-hour length. Another thing that only serves to bore is Véra Clouzot’s (Christina’s) acting. As the name suggests, she was married to director Clouzot, so that will obviously have played a role in her being cast as Christina, though that was definitely not to the film’s benefit. I get she’s supposed to play the hysteric, insecure, but I can only handle so much wide-eyed overacting before my interest dials down. All this made me feel like I was watching a thriller that used to be considered cutting-edge, but was now definitely showing its age…

…and then came the climactic plot twist. If you’re even reading this review, chances are you must have already seen the film, so consider this the spoiler-ridden paragraph where I explain everything. Read at your own peril. One night at the school, Christina believes she hears someone. She runs to the bathroom, only to find the headmaster lying inside the water filled bathtub. He stands up with limp hands and pops out his fake eyes. Christina, in shock, dies of heart attack. The headmaster looks upon her body as Nicole(!) walks in and embraces the headmaster. So he and Nicole had already thought out this whole ordeal from the start with the planned end result being Christina’s death. I was genuinely surprised by the ending and I instantly took to liking the film. There’s nothing worse than watching what you’ve been told is a classic, only to find you genuinely don’t like it. That seemed to be the case here, but the ending rights every wrong. I didn’t see it coming at all and was kind of shocked by how hardcore it is from an emotional and psychological standpoint: to stage such an elaborate trap for your wife so she can die of a heart attack so you can be with your mistress. That’s pretty darn brutal. I also like how the ending of a film from the fifties holds up even today in a time when theaters are being bombarded with torture porn. There’s something satisfying about that. With all these cheap attempts to shock audiences nowadays (many of them failing to do so), the now sixty-year-old Diabolique – also designed to shock – still holds up.