So arthouse horror month with my wife continues with this 1955 French film. The premise of it is that, at a boarding school in Sa’cloo (or as they spell it in the subtitles, “St. Cloud”), the principal’s wife and mistress both work as teachers, and he is a giant raving asshole, such that they decide to team up and kill him.

So now before I go any further, I’ll say this: The film ends with literally a giant spoiler warning, asking viewers not to ruin the plot for anyone else, which is just A++ for 1955. I feel like everyone’s had a good solid 65 years to catch the film, so it’s probably past the most critical spoiler period, but also it is a good movie and if you are inspired to watch it or think you might be, it’ll be better not to be spoiled (in fact, it’s best to go in knowing as little as possible about the movie), so.

Okay. So, the structure of the movie is that the first part of it is kind of like a light heist movie, where they’re plotting out how the killing is going to go down, but they hide enough of what they’re doing from you that you’re mostly like “why are they doing this? what are they going to do with that?” and trying to guess how it’s going to go down.

And then it goes down, and the movie shifts into a Crime and Punishment sort of mode where they become paranoid and guilty and turn on each other and the like. Especially when the body disappears, and when mysterious shit starts happening like someone sending back the dry-cleaned suit that the corpse was wearing.

And then the wife sort of accidentally ends up engaging a private detective to investigate her husband’s disappearance (she went to the morgue to see if a body was her husband; it wasn’t, and this guy basically force-volunteers himself to find her husband out of chivalry), which is an awkward thing to do when you murdered the dude.

From there, the tension keeps ratcheting up, both with the investigator and with unexplained creepy shit, and you the viewer try to figure out what’s going on — is the dude a Jason? did someone find the body and is blackmailing them? — and culminates in this very tense climactic scene, after which French Columbo explains it all.

I did figure it out before the big final scene (Jess had been spoiled for it and kindly did not spoil me); knowing that a twist was coming would be enough that you’d probably figure it out much earlier, but having gone into the movie totally blind, I wasn’t even sure what genre it was — not being able to rule out supernatural stuff leaves a lot of possibilities on the table that aren’t there if you know you’re dealing with a real-world scenario — so it worked at probably the ideal level for me where I was like, “hmm, what’s going on???” for a long time, and only relatively late was like, “oh, I see!”

Well-made, suspenseful, and surprisingly non-horrible in terms of gender stuff for a movie from the ’50s (by which I mean: the husband does engage in domestic violence, but he is a monstrously horrid person whose death we’re supposed to cheer on, and those acts are evidence for that, not just neutral facts). Recommended, but you probably shouldn’t have read this far if you’re going to heed that recommendation.