Diabolique (1955)

• Year: 1955
• Released: 21 Nov 1955
• Country: France
• Adwords: 4 wins
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046911/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/diabolique
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: French, English
• MPA Rating: Not Rated
• Genre: Crime, Drama, Horror
• Runtime: 117 min
• Writer: Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Henri-Georges Clouzot
• Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
• Cast: Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse
• Keywords: teacher, swimming pool, wife, morgue, mistress,

	8.1/10
	23% – Critics
	34% – Audience

Diabolique Storyline

Married Michel and Christina Delassalle are the headmaster and headmistress respectively of Institution Delassalle, a second rate boys’ boarding school in St. Cloud, outside of Paris. Although Christina officially owns it – she bringing it into their marriage as part of her dowry – Michel effectively makes all the decisions, partly because he wants to show everyone involved that he is in control as the man, and as Christina is a frail woman with a delicate constitution, the primary problem being a weak heart. Their marriage has long been over because of Michel’s brutish behavior toward her, although Christina, a devout Catholic, refuses to get a divorce. Michel has openly been having an affair with Nicole Horner, one of the teachers at the school. But even now their relationship is on the rocks as Michel beats her. Nicole convinces Christina that their collective problems can all be solved if they kill Michel. Nicole hatches an elaborate plan to take place over a long weekend: she and Christina will drive down to her house in Niort for the weekend, while Michel is stuck at the school; Christina will make up some ruse for Michel to come to Niort; they will drug and then drown him in Nicole’s bathtub; they will then transport the body back to the school before the end of the weekend, dumping the body into the school’s murky outdoor pool; the dead body will eventually rise to the surface and thus be discovered. With the successful execution of the plan, Nicole and Christina will have an alibi of being away for the weekend when he would have died by accidentally drowning in the pool. With a few required modifications and a few hiccups along the way, the latter largely due to Christina often losing her nerve, they are able to carry out the plan successfully, or so they believe. However, the body never materializes in the pool, even after the pool is emptied on a pretense. Other strange things happen with regard to a missing Michel which belie what Nicole and Christina believe to be reality. Did someone discover what they did, take the body and will eventually try to blackmail them? Is Michel still alive and just playing with them? Are their minds playing tricks on them? Or is there another reason they just have not thought about as a possibility?

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Diabolique Movie Reviews

The Greatest Film Hitchcock Did Not Make.

Hitchcock must have forever wondered how he managed to allow this story to slip out of his hands, but the fact remains: had he filmed CELLE QUI N’ETAIT PAS into his own version of what is known as LES DIABOLIQUES, there very well might not have been a VERTIGO, also an adaptation from the authors of the aforementioned one and D’ENTRE LES MORTES. All in all, this is an excellent horror film that has strong Film Noir overtones and precedes New Wave by a couple of years and its simple yet powerful direction by Jean Georges-Clouzot elevates it from a standard thriller to one to which all others are measured spawning countless imitations with much less satisfying degree. One wonders what treatment Hitchcock would have given it, and interestingly, it’s all here: the almost casual presentation of spousal abuse that occurs off-camera in one chilling scene early on, the events that lead the women (Vera Clouzot and Simone Signoret) to make a drastic decision concerning killing Clouzot’s husband (Michel DelaSalle), and then the growing, deadly certainty he may not be quite dead after all… and may be after the terrified women. The last 15 minutes are one of the most tension-inducing I’ve ever seen in any climactic montage (even if it does veer into a certain implausibility but the intent is to tell a suspense story and Hitchcock has often mentioned the “suspension of disbelief” factor) and have long gone into history as one of the most horrific moments in cinema.

To those interested in watching LES DIABOLIQUES, please do NOT watch its American remake, DIABOLIQUE, with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. It pays to read the subtitles in this film.

one of the best French films I have ever seen

I loved this movie so much! This is because I rarely have had a movie throw so many surprises and twists into the plot! Movies too often doing the conventional and expected is one of the reasons I like to watch a lot of foreign films and this one takes the cake! The film is a “noirish” suspense film about two women who want to kill the same man. One is the wife and the other is his mistress. They both meet and agree to kill him together! That alone makes this an interesting twist! What they exactly do and the twists that occur I don’t want to discuss, as it would really ruin the movie! Just believe me that the acting, writing and directing couldn’t be better and when it was over, I was more than satisfied!

An exemplary classic of French suspense cinema

LES DIABOLIQUES is a spooky and intense classic from France, a psychological thriller in which a pair of women decide to kill a bullying and controlling school headmaster. One of them is his wife, the other his mistress, and both hate him for good reason. Their plot goes to plan but the psychological toll of what they have done weighs heavy on them, compounded by further mystery when the body goes missing.

There’s very little to dislike about this classic movie which has a sheen of quality to it. The expert direction draws out the suspense of the situation without resorting to jump scares or sinister music; the camera-work is very fine and the slow-moving nature of the narrative allows you to become fully immersed in the realism of the piece. The actors are exemplary, as you would imagine, and the film features some quite wonderful ghastly set-pieces involving corpses rising from baths and the like. That it is still frightening when seen today says plenty.

LES DIABOLIQUES is also an influential movie; try watching Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and in particular Kubrick’s THE SHINING afterwards, you can see this film’s fingerprints all over them. The Shaw Brothers studio even went ahead to make their own, even more involved spin on the story, the quite wonderful HEX which turns out to be very nearly every bit as entertaining as this film, albeit in a quite different genre. Horror and thriller fans will be in their element with this outstanding lesson in movie-making.