A husband discovers that his wife's having an affair; he secretly gains
the lover's trust, then kills him. Chabrol takes this simple plot and
makes something unsettling and compelling out of it. Like an obsessive
stalker, his camera relentlessly tracks the characters, all of whom
try desperately to act as if everything's normal and nice, when it
plainly isn't. Picking away under the surface of relaxed bourgeois
manners, he finds festering insecurities and vulnerabilities; each
smile hides a little death. And it's precisely this that sets off the
inexorable cascade of events, building to a giddy final shot which
feels like falling into an abyss.
