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 L?wensohn 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 (L?wensohn) 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 C?te 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 BERBERIAN 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).