A Fever Dream Built From Spy Cinema’s Bones

Read Time:5 Minute, 37 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort)
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Genre: Spy Thriller, Mystery, Neo-Giallo
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 27m
Director(s): Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Writer(s): Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Cast: Fabio Testi, Yannick Renier, Koen De Bouw, Maria de Medeiros
Where to Watch: releasing on Shudder December 5, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: This isn’t a spy thriller interested in the usual games of covert operations or gadget-ready theatrics. Instead, Co-Directors/Writers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani approach the genre in a way we haven’t seen before. The film follows a 70-year-old ex-spy living in a luxury hotel on the Côte d’Azur whose routine shatters when the woman in the adjoining room disappears. Yet the disappearance is only the first card to fold. What follows is a spiral through fractured memories, illusions, and the ghosts of a past shaped by espionage, desire, and fantasy.

The press notes describe the film as one in which “moviemaking, memories, and madness collide,” and that combination defines this experience. What begins as a mystery quickly becomes an excavation of identity, filtered through the filmmakers’ signature visuals. Cattet and Forzani operate with the confidence of artists who know exactly how to weaponize style. Every pan, zoom, cut, transformation, and sound feels designed to push the audience deeper into a dream state. REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND reveals a new level of clarity in their approach. The thriller structure isn’t an excuse for the aesthetic; the aesthetic is the point, the language, the architecture that holds this story’s emotion.

At its core, this is a meditation on aging, ego, fractured masculinity, and the stories men tell themselves to avoid confronting their own irrelevance. The retired spy, played by Fabio Testi with a mix of charm and haunted fragility, becomes a man lost inside his own mythology. Testi’s casting is intentional; his “physical presence and career legacy” directly inform the character’s blurred sense of self. He is both an actor and a ghost of the cinema he once inhabited. Cattet and Forzani revel in this meta-casting. Testi isn’t simply performing; he’s embodying the collapse between character, iconography, and memory.

The hotel setting reinforces this collapse beautifully. It feels less like a real location and more like a stage built from fragments of sleazy Euro-spy comics, giallo fantasies, and noir sensibilities. Everything is heightened — the color palette, the silhouettes, even the furniture — creating a kaleidoscope of surfaces that trap the protagonist as tightly as any villain ever did. When the woman next door vanishes, it’s not presented as a standard mystery but as a rupture in his sense of continuity. She becomes a symbol of everything unresolved in his past, and her absence begins to erode his grip on reality.

Shots pile on one another in a rhythm that feels both intoxicating and disorienting. The filmmakers build sequences from razor-sharp micro-gestures: a spinning diamond, a flash of leather, the tightening of an eyelid, blood hitting glossy surfaces, reflections bouncing in mirrors like coded messages. The film treats images like a “mosaic of sensations,” meant to evoke the protagonist’s fractured mental state rather than provide clarity. That philosophy shapes the entire film. Instead of uncovering answers, the viewer becomes entangled in the protagonist’s sensory overload—a man drowning in his own cinematic legacy.

This approach works because the film embraces its artifice without apology. Cattet and Forzani aren’t chasing realism; they’re chasing the emotional truth of a genre built on seduction, illusion, and violence. The spy genre has always been about personas and performances, and REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND interrogates that legacy by turning it back on itself. The retired spy isn’t just a man with a past; he’s a collection of tropes that have outlived their usefulness. And yet the film treats him with empathy — not idealizing him, but exploring his unraveling with a mix of melancholy and dark humor.

Maria de Medeiros adds dignity to every moment she appears, while Yannick Renier and Koen De Bouw provide internal contrasts to Testi’s unraveling presence. The cast as a whole functions like components of a fever dream rather than conventional characters. They drift in and out of the narrative, sometimes as threats, sometimes as echoes, sometimes as figments of a life lived at the intersection of real espionage and cinematic self-mythology.

REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND works because it never tries to simplify itself. It honors the legacy of Euro-spy aesthetics while acknowledging the psychological wreckage those fantasies leave behind. It’s playful, self-aware, and impressively confident — a film that assumes the audience is smart enough to engage with its puzzle-box structure without hand-holding. And though some viewers may find its fragmented approach overwhelming, the film never apologizes for its ambition. Cattet and Forzani have always been filmmakers who speak in the language of sensation. Yet, here, their imagery supports a richer meditation on identity, aging, and the dissonance between who we were and who we tell ourselves we were. It’s a surreal spy thriller, a cinematic hallucination, and a deeply personal inquiry wrapped in extravagant genre trappings.

It’s also one of the most visually confident films of the year.

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[photo courtesy of SHUDDER]

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