Dundead: Reflection in a Dead Diamond

This film contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are a married director duo from France based in Brussels, and their films (Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, and their last film 2017’s Let the Corpses Tan) are all intensely stylised homages to 60s and 70s Euro genre cinema that go deeper, and harder, than mere pastiche. 

If anyone is keeping the pure cinema of giallo alive in 2026, it’s Cattet and Forzani. In the case of Reflection in a Dead Diamond, they have set their sights on vintage European crime and spy b-movies for inspiration, (particularly Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik) and the result is glorious.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (easily their best title, and quite possibly their best film to date) starts with a retired spy living a life of comfort on the French Riviera. From there, we see into his spectacular past life of espionage, glamour and graphic violence. Cattet and Forzani are firing on all cylinders here, conjuring up a kaleidoscopic barrage of pulpy cool to be consistently wowed by. 

While the film absolutely succeeds as an exercise in sheer style, as befitting its central story there is also an intriguing thread of melancholy to the film which Cattet and Forzani gently tug on, as well as a mind-expanding metatextual element. Cattet and Forzani have been in the business of making films like this for nearly 20 years (longer if you take their short film work into account) and it feels like they’ve reached a new stratum with this one. If this is mature-period Hélène and Bruno, long may it continue.