French directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have spent nearly two decades making some of the strangest, most memorable genre films of all time. Their giallo films Amer and The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears mixed trippy eroticism with horror. Their spaghetti western/Poliziotteschi hybrid Let the Corpses Tan hit in 2017. Now they’ve turned to the spy thriller, and the result, Reflection in a Dead Diamond, is their boldest work yet.
Shudder is where you can stream this film, and it comes close to what a James Bond movie would look like if Quentin Tarantino had directed it.
Diman’s Bloody Retirement
The plot is simple on paper. Aging superspy John Diman (Fabio Testi) lives out his retirement in a luxury French Riviera hotel. But the film isn’t really about the retirement. It’s about the bloody, glittering, sexually deviant memories that keep flooding back.
The movie outfits its vehicles with machine guns and dresses a temptress from head to foot in gleaming camera lenses. It fills the screen with sword work, mechanical devices, rapturous naked moments, artificial countenances, and many leather bodysuits. It tells its tale without dialogue, relying solely on sound and picture, aiming to strike the audience dead with a single visual blow.
The film does not shy away from the cruelty and disrespect toward women shown by John Diman, who could just as easily have been called Bond or Diabolik. It instead sets out to recreate and make worse the rougher elements found in early Bond films, alongside the work of Italian filmmakers such as Mario Bava.
A Trip Through the Subconscious
The film uses effects that truly deserve the word “psychedelic.” Faces are endlessly split apart by diamond shapes. One particularly funny sequence sees Mission: Impossible face masks stripped away one at a time… and then one more time, and again.
The action and violence are chopped up through expressive editing. Bond intro/Saul Bass-style colorful silhouettes stand in for some of the more outrageous acts. The main villain is a shapeshifting seductress named Serpentik, who can hypnotize victims into thinking they are starring in a film.
This is without question the most daring, expressive and unrestrained material ever to appear in the spy genre.
Tarantino’s Tactile Brutality
Tarantino has made no secret over the years that he’d love to direct a standalone Bond picture drawing from Ian Fleming’s original novels. The prospect of his fetishistic love of film history and tactile brutality being applied to the 007 series is thrilling — but with that unlikely to happen, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is almost certainly the closest we’ll get.
The movie’s splatter scenes, its tight close-ups, and its throwback soundtrack recall the techniques Tarantino employed to liven up the Kill Bill films, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained. These filmmakers demonstrate a real grasp of genre and the physicality of film that matches Tarantino’s.
Sound Design That Squeaks
The film’s sound design rivals anything found outside an arthouse movie or a Tarantino production, going far beyond mere visual effects. Leather creaks and cracks with exquisite loudness. Diamonds work their way into both the leather and human flesh.
It’s all so fetishistically detailed as to border on ASMR, lending every act, especially the violent ones, a visceral tactility that’s unheard of in the spy genre. And that’s before we get to the immolations and katana murders.
What You Need to Know
- Release Date: November 5, 2025
- Runtime: 87 Minutes
- Director: Bruno Forzani, Héléne Cattet
- Writers: Bruno Forzani, Héléne Cattet
- Producers: Pierre Foulon
Other performers round out the cast alongside Fabio Testi, who plays the aging Diman.
Buckle Up for the Ride
Once viewers accept that they’re riding a wild journey through the mind rather than settling into a standard spy tale, fans of Tarantino and the spy genre will surely discover plenty to enjoy in Reflection in a Dead Diamond.
It’s got more sex, violence, opulence, and dazzling visuals than a single film can almost sustain — and it’s easily one of the best films of 2025. The film is streaming today on Shudder.
See the video the story is built around at Collider.
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