Something to watch tonight: Friday 12 December

GUEST POST: Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort, Cattet et Forzani, 2025)

Editor’s Note

I’m delighted to be able to hand today’s recommendation to current subscriber (and temporary flatmate) Doug Dillaman, whose writing about culture you can find at Making Things Better and Letterboxd.

Doug made Gut Instinct which we recommended here in August.

We both watched Reflection in a Dead Diamond the other night and, while I was in the “utterly baffled” camp, Doug made some typically canny observations so I asked him to write them up for us here:

Do you like James Bond title sequences? Would you like an entire film shot like one, with all the cinematic imagination and vertiginous leaps of logic implicit in that description? Reflection in a Dead Diamond offers that - and so much more.

This is the fourth feature-length transmission from the minds of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Their first two films mined the recesses of Italian horror, instantly demonstrating a commitment to restlessly inventive visuals whilst placing narrative and character firmly in the background, possibly in a locked basement in a neighbouring villa. I saw their debut Amer at NZIFF, in 2010 and an angry genre fan declared to me afterwards, “That doesn’t belong in a film festival! That belongs in a gallery!” And I half-agree: every last shot in any Cattet/Forzani, lensed on grainy beautiful super-16mm film, is given as much love as a painter gives a painting.

Ignoring the haters, NZIFF brought the couple here in 2017 for Let The Corpses Tan, in which they reinvigorated the western and delivered their punchiest narrative and most accessible film yet. (I was lucky enough to host 2 Q&As with them, where they revealed themselves to be a normal happy couple who, like virtually no other happy couple in the world, had their first date at a Gaspar Noé film.) Their announcement that their next film would enter the world of Eurospy thrillers (like Danger: Diabolik, recently screened at Wellington’s Roxy cinema) seemed to promise a further step towards the mainstream.

Nah.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond is told from the point of view of an aged man (84-year old genre icon Fabio Testi) living at a seaside resort, who catches sight of a diamond nipple ring on a bare-chested sunbather. (Far from the last nudity you’ll see.) This promptly produces a kaleidoscopic reverie of what may or may not be his previous adventures as a secret agent. Over the course of the film, these memories ripple into his present life. Is his previous nemesis back on his trail? Is dementia catching up to him? Can he pay his bar tab? Is all of this secondary in a film that is designed to send us dizzily spinning through the world’s most alluring hall of mirrors?

Possibly my favourite film of the year, Reflection in a Dead Diamond cannily critiques genre tropes while taking superlative style to new heights. It left me with a huge smile on my face about 95% of the time. (A fair bit of the remaining 5% was devoted to flinching at some quite impactful moments of violence, the only thing that seems to have earned this film a berth on horror-centric streamer Shudder¹. But any Eurospy film - especially one that can be compared to Last Year at Marienbad and Adaptation, further confused by a protagonist in cognitive decline - might intimidate those who aren’t steeped in European genre cinema and don’t know fumetti² from fusilli.

I say: give it a try. Turn it off after ten minutes if you hate it - it’s just going to keep doing what it’s doing, more or less - but otherwise, enjoy the ride. And if you feel bewildered, just imagine you’re in an art gallery.

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Where to watch Reflection in a Dead Diamond