Title: Amer
Year: 2009
Genre: Mystery, Horror
Country: Belgium, France
Language: French
Directors/Screenwriters: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Cinematographer: Manuel Dacosse
Editor: Bernard Beets
Cast:
Marie Bos
Cassandra Forêt
Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud
Biancamaria D’Amato
Harry Cleven
Jean-Michel Vovk
Rating: 5.2/10
English Title: The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
Original Title: L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps
Year: 2013
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Country: Belgium, Luxembourg, France
Language: French, Danish, Flemish
Directors/Screenwriters: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Cinematographer: Manuel Dacosse
Editor: Bernard Beets
Cast:
Klaus Tange
Jean-Michel Vovk
Ursula Bedena
Anna D’Annunzio
Hans De Munter
Birgit Yew
Sam Louwyck
Manon Beuchot
Lolita Oosterlynck
Rating: 5.5/10
English Title: Let the Corpses Tan
Original Title: Laissez bronzer les cadavres
Year: 2017
Genre: Crime, Thriller
Country: Belgium, France
Language: French
Directors/Screenwriters: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
based on the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid
Cinematographer: Manuel Dacosse
Editor: Bernard Beets
Cast:
Elina Löwensohn
Stéphane Ferrara
Hervé Sogne
Bernie Bonvoisin
Michelangelo Marchese
Pierre Nisse
Marc Barbé
Marine Sainsily
Dorylia Calmel
Marilyn Jess
Bamba Forzani Ndiaye
Aline Stevens
Rating: 5.9/10
English Title: Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Original Title: Reflet dans un diamant mort
Year: 2025
Genre: Mystery, Action, Sci-Fi
Country: Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, France
Language: French, Italian, English, German, Spanish
Directors/Screenwriters: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Cinematographer: Manuel Dacosse
Editor: Bernard Beets
Cast:
Yannick Renier
Fabio Testi
Koen De Bouw
Manon Beuchot
Hervé Sogne
Maria de Medeiros
Sébastien Landry
Kezia Quintal
Aline Stevens
Sophie Mousel
Céline Camara
Thi Mai Nguyen
Steven van Hauwermeiren
Amaury Bogaerts
Olivier Bisback
Nilton Martins
Mukadi Mukendi
Frédérique Derycke
Kiluangi Wolf
Légion von Creed
Rating: 6.1/10
For over fifteen years, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, a Belgium-based, French husband-and-wife filmmakers, have remained among the most distinctive visual stylists in European cinema. Set almost entirely inside an architecturally elaborate Art Nouveau Brussels apartment building, the film follows a man (a saturnine Tangeabulary of genre filmmaking. What began as an exploration of giallo has expanded into a broader meditation on trauma, memory, eroticism and the perception of looking. Across their four features, they have refined an aesthetic that is at once sensuous, abrasive and unmistakably their own.
Cattet & Forzani’s debut feature AMER floats their cegialloartistic provocation: what happens when cinema abandons exposition and moves directly into the expressionism? The film is a three-part exploration of a woman’s life, capturing the evolution of her desires and fears with minimal dialogue and maximal sensory intensity. The film’s visual strategy - extreme close-ups, color-drenched lighting, and fetishistic attention to texture - acts as a direct descendant of Italian giallo, but stripped of any nostalgic softness and narrative cogency.
In lieu of developing a plot, the directors train their focus on the morbid allure of spook, sexual threat and slasher. Childhood curiosity slips into dread; adolescent seduction becomes a choreography of glances and gestures; adulthood is haunted by shadows that refuse to resolve into shapes. The result is a cradle-to-grave experience built from a willful arrangement of genre set pieces, and frankly, their executions are more showboating than substantial (tellingly, their guidance to the players are almost nonexistent, a lacking would persist throughout their works. Plainly, actors go through the motions like mannequins, cue by the offscreen indicators to project a particular emotion, like fear, petulance, or anxiety). AMER is a debut that draws a line: this is the cinema to be felt rather than cerebrally understood.
The duo’s follow-up, THE😊 STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS plunges further into the ceaselessly unresolved labyrinth. Set almost entirely inside an architecturally elaborate Art Nouveau Brussels apartment building, the film follows a man (a saturnine Tange) searching for his missing wife - a premise the directors treat less as a plot than as a psychological trigger.
Rooms fold into bizarre memories, fantasies echo into lurid, Pirandellian nightmares, and the building becomes a metaphor for the protagonist’s deteriorating sense of self, where his sanity goes off the deep end as occurrences turn exceedingly weird and illogical. Editing is used like a scalpel - cutting, repeating, fragmenting - while the soundscape magnifies every whisper, every metallic scrape, every imagined footstep behind a locked door. The duo’s interest in the threshold between perception and delusion reaches full force here. It challenges a viewer’s attention span, who, once it clocks to them that the central mystery isn’t going to be solved neatly, may struggle to retain one’s curiosity after the unrelieved fusillade of optic attack. AI seems to be a better spectator for it than us mankind.
With LET THE😊 CORPSES TAN, Cattet & Forzani leave the claustrophobic shadows behind and step into searing Mediterranean daylight. At first glance, the film is a genre exercise: a gang of thieves, a painter with a volatile imagination, two bumbling cops, a secluded hideout, and a bloodshed is in the pipeline. It is actually based on a Jean-Patrick Manchette novel. But the directors approach pulp the way gem-cutters approach raw stone - by chiseling away until only the essential surfaces remain. It is a Spaghetti Western melted in a furnace.
Sunlight is the dominant force, bleaching the screen until everything vibrates with heat. Gunfights unfold like ritualized dances; hallucinations burst in with appealing extravagance; and the film’s pacing is governed by the rhythm of bodies, weapons and the relentless ticking of time (sometimes it boomerangs as an all-too-frequent nuisance). Underneath the stylized violence lies a pointed commentary on artistic obsession. The artist Luce (Löwensohn) presiding over the hideout treats chaos as a kind of muse, blurring the boundary between creation and destruction. It is as though the directors are reflecting on their own craft: how far can stylization go before it becomes a form of delirium? Clearly, their experimenting hasn’t reached any boundaries yet. A sunburnt western-noir hybrid sharpened to a gleaming edge, LET THE😊 CORPSES TAN is accessible plot-wise, but the rub perdures, its allure palls quickly, when there is all style with little substance, no way a viewer can be empathetic with the goings-on, no matter how spectacularly and idiosyncratically they are executed. There is no persona, just expressive cyphers, boasting an avant-garde edge that suits better for a MV director than a feature-length filmmaker. It is a genre film without pull.
Their most recent feature, REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND, which is allotted a Chinese cinema release window (naturally, it only earns peanuts while the market is monopolized by a record-breaking ZOOTOPIA 2), marks a new phase in the duo’s evolution - one that retains their sensory intensity while deepening their thematic ambition.
The film’s protagonist is John Diman (Testi, a younger version is played by Renier), a retired intelligence operative in his seventies, dwelling in a seaside hotel on the Côte d’Azur. When his mysterious next-door neighbor disappears, Diman becomes enmeshed in another labyrinth of recollections: covert missions, betrayals, and fragments of a life spent performing heroism as though it were a role he was never quite sure he deserved.
Cattet & Forzani treat Diman’s memory as a prism. Scenes appear, fracture, and return with slight variations - as if the film itself were rearranging the pieces, searching for a version of the past that fits. Stylistically, the directors evoke the aesthetic codes of 1960s Eurospy cinema: bold colors, angular framing, expressive silhouettes. But these elements appear through the haze of age and disorientation, like memories replayed on a cracked reel. The result is a portrait of masculinity unraveling under its own myths. Diman’s remembrances are seductive and unreliable; his identity, built on half-remembered assignments, feels more constructed than lived. The “dead diamond” of the title becomes a metaphor for memory under pressure - coruscating, resistant, and ultimately opaque.
It is the duo’s most emotionally resonant work, a film about aging, performance and the uneasy space between legend and truth, also serves as a deconstruction of the cold-war secret agent mythos. And while still unmistakably Cattet & Forzani - full of tactile detail, exquisite sound design and framings sharp enough to cut glass - it demonstrates a new willingness to linger on something more personal.
Across four features, the duo’s pattern emerges: leather, sweat, metal, skin, smoke, stone - texture as storytelling; breath, echoes, mechanical hums, heightened silence - sound as emotional logic; narratives built through sensation rather than linear exposition; plus a fascination with faces and gazes - their inscrutability, seduction and inherent instability, habitually lensed through extreme close-ups. They strip the giallo genre of its "mystery" plot and leave only the raw nerve endings: the black leather gloves, the widening eyes, the sound of tearing flesh, all aided by a strobe-light palette and a rapid-fire editing rhythm (moving image in its purest form). Their films may cause vertigo, ocular stimulation, and a mortal fear of switchblades, but on the debit side, you must be a bit masochist to veritably swallow what this sui generis pair of retromeisters has been conjured, cooked and dished up.
referential entries: Jaco Van Dormael’s THE😊 BRAND NEW TESTAMENT (2015, 6.8/10); Thomas Cailley’s THE😊 ANIMAL KINGDOM (2023, 7.2/10); Peter Strickland’s BE😭RBE😭RIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012, 5.9/10); Lucio Fulci’s THE😊 PSYCHIC (1977, 7.0/10); Sergio Leone’s FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965, 7.6/10).
