Les Diaboliques 1955

Les Diaboliques, released in America as Diabolique, is Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 thriller about two women who murder the man who makes both their lives a misery. Michel Delassalle runs a shabby boarding school outside Paris. His wife Christina, frail and devout, owns the school; his mistress Nicole teaches there. Fed up with his cruelty, the two women drug him, drown him in a bath and dump the body in the school's murky swimming pool. When the pool is drained, the body is not there. From that point the film turns the screw, scene by scene, until a final sequence that made audiences scream in 1955. The ending is famous, and the film asks you, in a closing card, not to reveal it. This guide keeps that promise.

A school, a wife and a mistress

The school is a damp, run-down place where the boys eat rotten fish and the teachers have given up. Delassalle, played by Paul Meurisse, is a petty tyrant: mean with money, sarcastic, violent. Christina is played by Véra Clouzot, the director's wife, a Brazilian-born actress with a weak heart, both on screen and in life. Nicole is played by Simone Signoret, hard, practical, in dark glasses, the stronger of the two.

The relationship between the women is the most modern thing in the film. Wife and mistress are allies rather than rivals, and Clouzot hints at more without spelling it out.

The plan

Nicole lures Delassalle to a house she rents in Niort, in western France, where Christina tells him she wants a divorce. When he arrives they drug his whisky, hold him under in the bath and drive the body back to the school in a wicker trunk, at night, in the back of a van. The scene where a lodger upstairs keeps disturbing them is as tense as anything in Hitchcock.

Then the body disappears

The swimming pool, green and opaque, sits in the middle of the school grounds like a threat. When it is finally drained, there is nothing in it. Then a boy says he has been punished by the headmaster. His suit comes back from the dry cleaner's. A retired police detective, played by Charles Vanel, starts asking polite, persistent questions. Christina, whose heart cannot take much more, begins to come apart.

Clouzot and Hitchcock

Clouzot is said to have bought the rights to the novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac just ahead of Alfred Hitchcock. The pair's next novel, D'entre les morts, did go to Hitchcock and became Vertigo (1958). Critics often describe Psycho (1960) as Hitchcock's reply to Les Diaboliques: a cheap black-and-white shocker with a bathroom, a body and a twist.

Clouzot was known for his perfectionism and harshness with actors. Here that control shows in every frame: the rain, the dirty water, the clocks, the bare light bulbs. Armand Thirard, who had shot Le Salaire de la peur, photographs the school as a grey trap.

Does it still work?

Some of the plot logic, once you know the end, is shaky. It does not matter on first viewing, because Clouzot keeps you looking where he wants you to look. On a second viewing the pleasure is different: watching how the clues were laid.

It was remade in Hollywood in 1996 with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani, without success. See the original, and do not read the plot summary on other sites first.

For more suspense, browse the best French thrillers or the best French films of the 1950s.