Reflection in a Dead Diamond

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have spent fifteen years making films out of the visual grammar of Italian genre cinema — Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, Let the Corpses Tan — and Reflet dans un diamant mort is their first Berlinale competition entry. It is a Belgian-French-Italian-Luxembourgish production and, at 87 minutes, the densest thing they have made.

Fabio Testi, a fixture of 1970s Italian thrillers, plays a man in a Riviera hotel whose memories of life as a superspy called John D. may be recollection, fantasy or the plot of something he once watched. Yannick Renier plays the younger version; Maria de Medeiros appears in the present. The directors cut between eras with the same battery of extreme close-ups, split diopters, zooms and giallo colour they always use, and the film is closer to a collage than a narrative.

Reviews split predictably between exhilarated and exhausted — 3.59 on Letterboxd from 24,000 ratings. It is the most purely formalist film in the catalogue's recent additions, and if the style connects, nothing else looks like it.