One of Christopher Nolan’s most intriguing comments on “Tenet”’s ill-fated 2020 press tour unveiled the mode of inspiration for his time-swerving spy thriller. He wanted to collate the tropes of the sub-genre from his memory and recollections of film viewings past, hoping the mental results would result in a spy movie urtext — an espionage flick composed of the most profound elements of all other espionage flicks. Concluding the thought, he cited Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” as an example of the same kind of approach, but with classic Hollywood westerns.
If “Tenet” was some kind of definitive arabesque on the spy movie, it would make a fine double bill at a classy cinematheque with “Reflection in a Dead Diamond,” which has just premiered in competition at the Berlinale. Co-directed by the artsy genre specialists Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the film shuffles a myriad of spy thriller trademarks, like a particularly deft croupier, whereas “Tenet” would arrange them like tidy, brutalist blocks that could be recombined at will. If these Nolan cross-references are pushing it, Cattet and Forzani indeed show themselves as up to date with newer manifestations of this sub-genre (although thankfully not with “Kingsman”): its first shot of waves violently crashing a pearlescent beach is nearly identical to the opening imagery of “Inception.”
That tiny hint of “Inception” is still predominantly outweighed by helpings of the leerier Connery Bonds, true 70s softcore and exploitation flicks, and the conspiratorial mask obsessions of silent French serials like “Les Vampires.” The characters swap places, identities, ages and roles; time itself is the slipperiest “mark” for the audience to tail, comprehend and bend back into a hopefully linear shape. Hailing from francophone Belgium, and previously noted for the giallo homage “Amer,” and the Spaghetti Western tribute “Let the Corpses Tan,” Cattet and Forzani’s work lives in the interstices of genre pastiche and arthouse abstraction, although to their credit and individuality, they definitely don’t suit the current trend for so-called “elevated” horror. For all its flair, “Reflection in a Dead Diamond” has the pre-fabricated would-be cult appeal that satiates and flatters genre film festivals and wider, retro B movie culture, although its placement in Berlin’s main competition feels like a statement by the curators to inspect what they do a bit more seriously.
So, examining the plot, the directors’ screenplay lays out two primary character arcs, yet with their fast-cutting visuals and offbeat découpage, telling them apart and fully differentiating them is a challenging task, especially in the first act. We’re on the Côte d’Azur, and a suave older gentleman played by Fabio Testi is whiling away what seems like a peachy, blissful retirement, however much he’s internally meditating on mysterious past events never fully resolved. Yet as we learn, he actually lives in a dreamy, purgatorial interzone in a cosy coastal hotel, where he owes money, we learn, to indefinitely extend his stay. His neighbour in room 317 next door has been complaining about him, and we see Testi’s character gazing at her later on, revealing her to be a beautiful, bikini-clad young woman whose face is never fully exposed by the camera, and he can’t bring himself to make a casual conversational approach.
A strange delivery of a black envelope with gold lining introduces the dashing Yannick Renier as John Diman, a super-spy in an inexact 60s-to-70s time period being briefed for his next mission, if he chooses to accept it (and he does!). He teams up with a sequin dress-clad colleague code-named Moth (Céline Camara) to track the oil billionaire Markus Strand (Koen De Bouw), ensuring he stays safe from the menacing advances of the catsuit-arrayed assassin Serpentik, who’s cleverly incarnated by several performers (among them, Thi Mai Nguyen and Sylvia Camarda), as a Dr. Mabuse-like chimera of free-floating threat. But remembering the appeal of these films’ antagonists as more desirable rooting interests, compared to the oft-blander, lantern-jawed heroes, could we sympathise with her targeting this oligarchic figure, who maybe deserves what’s coming to him?
Various camera tricks, match cuts and multiple exposures reveal that Testi is playing an older John Diman, recalling his past intelligence days as a younger man. Yet this still doesn’t account for the many metafictional and cross-media slippages Cattet and Forzani apportion across its quite ample 87-minute running time. The triangular outline of a diamond becomes a portal through which the characters seem to understand their essential falsity: they’re being coerced themselves by malign forces from the commercial film and publishing industries, where “John Diman” is merely a cloak to inhabit, whose own wearer has paltry interiority or substance themselves. Admittedly, this is more difficult to explain in prose than just to imagine a lava lamp orgying with a disco ball as a bullet-time gun battle ensues, and with all these slender snippets of narrative making themselves known in subliminal fragments.
How successfully “Reflection in a Dead Diamond” works for you is predicated on what exact flavor of genre film fan you might be. With it coming from Belgium’s polyglot film industry, and folding in Italian as well as central European reference points, I have seen how it lights up a viewer from that region’s brain, in my post-screening chats. For an anglophone viewer like myself, it brought a flimsier Tarantino pastiche, along with Guy Maddin, to mind: a fetish object both embracing and giggling at this popular genre’s cheesy conventions. It often looks beautiful, yet that beauty also has an ostentatious quality. Ultimately, it’s a case in point for how an impeccably styled arthouse-grindhouse crossover can feel both dense with signifiers to unpack (although lacking more commonly understood kinds of “depth”), but also fleet, frothy and fun.
Grade: B
“Reflection in a Dead Diamond” premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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