A.K.A. The Butcher
This is one of those quiet thrillers where most of the action takes place below the surface. It's all about slow pacing and tranquil settings and blossoming romances, with the darker, stabbier stuff happening in the background (assuming we get to see it at all). But Claude Chabrol shows a clear understanding of the genre by combining Hitchcockian suspense with French New Wave cinematography to create some continual, uneasy, and free-flowing tension, which can be felt even in scenes that otherwise appear to be completely innocuous.
So while this means that the movie's generally pretty light on outright scares, it's still effective in the sense that you spend basically the entire runtime expecting something horrific to happen. And then, when it inevitably does, the outcome is one of the tensest third acts I've seen in a while. Granted, things don't necessarily play out in the way that you'd expect (just as the story isn't as reliant on mystery or horror as it really could've been; everything about this one is subdued and strange), but it works on a tonal and character level, while still providing the melancholic thrills that we've long been anticipating.
Grade: A-
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