NOW ON SHUDDER! An unforgettable cinematic trip into a universe beyond imagination is waiting for you to press the button and enter the retro euro-style masterpiece Reflection In A Dead Diamond, written and directed by ultra-auteurs Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. In a hotel by the sea in Côte d’Azur, retired secret agent John Diman (Fabio Testi) sips bitters and stares out at a girl on the beach. She removes her top for sunbathing, exposing diamond nipple rings that gleam in the sun. Any pleasure that welled up in the old man drained fast when the girl’s corpse is discovered in the sands.
Yannick Renier in Hélène Cattet’s and Bruno Forzani’s REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND. Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder release
“…Diman then realizes he is a secret agent in a series of popular European films. Then reality shatters again…”
Death and diamonds spin through his memories back to when he was a young international super spy (Yannick Renier), with looks that could kill as fast as all his lethal gadgets. He and fellow spy (Celine Camera) were working on tracking down Serpentik (Thi Mai Nguyen), the masked assassin who pricks the back of necks with a ring that has a poison needle. Memories of the old John Diman splinter along with the reality of young John Diman. It may be that he has been targeted by another masked assassin, the super dangerous Kinetik. Kinetik is a faceless illusionist who hypnotizes his victims so that they believe they are living inside a movie. This means when the screen says “The End,” anyone under his spell will die. John Diman then realizes he is a secret agent in a series of popular European films. Then reality shatters again, and then again. Unseen splendors will rock the viewer as the film’s style flies so high it becomes the content itself
I have always loved movies, but the time period of cinema where my passion exploded into an addiction was what was going on in Italy during the last century. Italy was making pop genre films using a film vocabulary that no one had ever seen before. Colors and camera angles previously unimagined paraded across the screen with the wildest musical scores ever heard. Tarantino, during a screening he held of Violent City in Austin, described the Italian style as “operatic”, which definitely captures the grandiosity and intensity of the period. It is a style that deafens the eyes and blinds the ears, and I love it. Cattet and Forzani also love it, as Reflection In A Dead Diamond is essentially a temple to cinema done Italian style. They did this successfully with The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, then did it even better with the phenomenal Let The Corpses Tan, which won the Nuggie award for Stoner Movie of the Year in 2018.
"…the best movie of 2025."
