Movie · 2025 · Action, Thriller, Mystery · 1h 27m · French
Curator score: 5.8/10 (23.6K ratings)
Overview
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.
Ratings
Curator score: 5.8/10
IMDb: 6.2/10
Letterboxd: 3.58/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 85%
Metacritic: 78
TMDB: 6.1/10
Director
Bruno Forzani, Hélène Cattet
Production
Kozak Films, Les Films Fauves, Dandy Projects, Tobina Film, Savage Film, To Be Continued
Cast
Fabio Testi, Yannick Renier, Koen De Bouw, Maria de Medeiros, Thi-Mai Nguyen, Céline Camara, Kézia Quental, Sylvia Camarda, Sophie Mousel, Hervé Sogne, Barbara Hellemans, Sébastien Landry, Manon Beuchot, Nilton Martins, Aline Stevens, Olivier Bisback
Where to watch
AMC+, Philo, Shudder
Curator Review
Verdict
A dazzling, highly stylized spy-giallo fever dream that prioritizes image, texture, and memory over conventional plotting. It’s likely to thrill viewers who want cinema as sensory overload and genre remix, but it can feel opaque or self-enclosed if you need clean narrative momentum.
Best for
fans of Eurospy, giallo, and retro genre pastiche
viewers who love formal experimentation and audiovisual excess
people interested in aging-spy stories and memory-driven narratives
audiences who enjoy films that feel like a dream, collage, or hallucination
Skip if
you want a straightforward thriller with clear stakes
you dislike fragmented storytelling or heavy stylization
you prefer naturalistic acting and dialogue
you’re not in the mood for a film that leans more on mood than plot
Overview
Reflection in a Dead Diamond is the kind of movie that seems built from obsessions rather than a screenplay. It takes the bones of a retired-spy thriller and floods them with giallo color, Eurospy swagger, erotic menace, and a constant sense that memory itself is the real villain. The result is less a mystery to solve than a sensory trap to wander through.
Worth noting
What makes it work is the precision of the filmmaking. Every frame feels engineered for texture, reflection, and unease, with editing and sound design doing as much storytelling as the dialogue. The film’s pleasures are immediate and physical: gloved hands, mirrored surfaces, old wounds, and the glamorous rot of a life spent inside genre fantasies.
Bottom line
It won’t be for everyone, especially if you want a conventional spy plot or emotional clarity. But for viewers who respond to cinema as atmosphere, citation, and delirium, it’s a striking and often exhilarating experience. It’s one of those films that doesn’t just reference old genre movies; it tries to make you feel haunted by them.
Top Letterboxd reviews
matt lynch (4.5★) · 789 likes
Their best film yet, a laser-focused audiovisual fetish board Franju Franco Bava Techniscope Eurospy movie, pretty much made exclusively for me.
GrumpyMustard (4.5★) · 513 likes
Dopamine cinema at its finest. A shimmering plunge into the mind of an aging movie star turned spy who can’t outrun the memories that made him a legend. What happens to the spy heroes long after their own "happily ever after" bs that comes with the genre? What if we could take a trip through a disjointed tunnel in their mind to re-live those memories with them?
Easier to walk in expecting an aesthetic experience rather than a straight story.… more
shookone (4.5★) · 457 likes
the James Bond entry you were always dreaming of and longing for (even if you didn't know). how has Barbara Broccoli not approached these guys yet?
Forzani & Cattet doing their Forzani & Cattet thing, means pure aestheticism until your eye balls are popping out. the rough pixelated analogue film material meets razor sharp editing and a wonderful stylish score and musical needle drops.
genre homage from spy via martial arts to giallo, from soft sex to slasher. it's a feast of… more
Josh Lewis (4★) · 437 likes
If Mario Bava directed a Connery Bond legacy sequel about him elderly, retired and sitting at a seaside resort having a refracted kaleidoscopic deathdream about his (and his screen persona’s) career + a Karloff in Targets/Arnold in Last Action Hero meta-identity crisis blurring of fiction and reality, it would probably look and sound something like this. “Contemplate your work.” I would watch these two put their gorgeous postmodern, avant-garde ASMR fetish object spin on as many different violent and erotic European exploitation subgenres as they want.
Sean Fennessey (3.5★) · 371 likes
I would be fascinated to see what Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani could do with a more conventional Hollywood screenplay. Imagine if they had a crack at, say, Scott Frank's sensual, ticking-clock sensibility.
Anyway, this a freight train of visual execution, every single image pored over, perfectly lit and designed, grotesque but gorgeous. They are singular and yet iterative. I don't want to spoil their mojo, but I'm still curious...
1980 · Drama, Thriller, Comedy · 1h 58m · R · Curator 1.5/10 (10.2K ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, Night Flight Plus, Midnight Pulp, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
An eccentric, mind-bending film about identity, performance, and psychological instability.