À double tour

(Web of Passion) Chabrol’s gleefully transgressive film is a gorgeous Provençal murder mystery in which a dangerous interloper exposes the rot at the heart of a wealthy family. A wealthy Provençal family. A dangerous interloper. A murder that feels, in retrospect, entirely inevitable. Chabrol’s second feature trades the austerity of his debut for something altogether more lurid, adapting Stanley Ellin’s novel with a gleeful sense of transgression. The result is a film that prefigures the Hitchcockian thrillers to come – sun-drenched, serpentine and shot through with class malice. Contains scenes of domestic violence or abuse.