Co-directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, were two of the notable names who helped spearhead the neo-Giallo boom of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Admittedly, both Amer (2009) and The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013) were just as much surreal art house films as they were throwbacks to Italian thrillers of a bygone era. As a result, these two films were either lauded for their beautifully retro aesthetics by gif-making Tumblr bloggers, or heavily criticised for their incoherence by traditional purists. (For the record, I really enjoyed both of these films; despite making neither sense of them.) The duo expanded their appreciation for Italian genre cinema even further with Let the Corpses Tan (2017), which harkened to Spaghetti Westerns and Poliziotteschi films of the Sixties and Seventies.
Now they're back with another ode to the past with the bizarrely titled, Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025). The synopsis reads:
When the mysterious woman in the room next door disappears, a debonair 70-year-old ex-spy living in a luxury hotel on the Côte d’Azur is confronted by the demons and darlings of a lurid past in which moviemaking, memories and madness collide.
Euro-spy films flourished after the success of the Bond franchise, so it's kind of a win for Cattet and Forzani in casting none other than Italy's very own Sean Connery, Fabio Testi, for their latest movie.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond | Trailer
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani | 2025
The trailer looks suitably cinematic and stylish. I'm all in after seeing the rear projected driving scene featuring a masked latex person in a sports car. An obvious homage to Mario Bava's classic comic book caper Danger: Diabolik (1968).
Whether or not Reflection in a Dead Diamond is any good remains to be seen, but given all the awful slop around right now, this is definitely the potential gem to offer some respite.
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