🔱 Directed by Claude Chabrol, a pioneer of the New Wave of French
🔱 Recognized as the pinnacle of psychological thrillers
The household is divided between the happy blended family and the illiterate maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) who nurses her violent grudges with the equally twisted local post-mistress (Isabelle Huppert). A drama not only of class but of culture, where constant, painful struggles deal not only with power and tasks Sandrine avoids but also where television is opposed to books and opera. And a grim denouement.
Chabrol returns to murder in the bourgeois family with arguably his greatest masterpiece, drawing on English novelist Ruth Rendell’s dramatization of actual events in the 1930s (which also inspired Jean Genet’s play The Maids).
Director: Claude Chabrol
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacqueline Bisset
 | About the Director Claude Chabrol (1930-2010) was a French film director, one of the pioneers of the New Wave of French cinema that began in the late 1950s, and a critic for Cahiers du Film. Chabrol's first feature film, Le beau Serge, in 1958, is considered one of the representative films of the French New Wave. In 1959, Chabrol won the Golden Bear for Les Cousins at the 9th Berlin International Film Festival. | |