L'Enfer

REVIEW
There's an unsettling discord between the open, sun-drenched country inn where L'Enfer is set, and the spiralling descent into madness which the film depicts. A husband (Cluzet) becomes increasingly obsessional regarding his wife's (Béart) supposed infidelities. While the film is sometimes ambivalent about her actual culpability, there is no doubt that Cluzet has crossed into a reality of his own making. Chabrol's masterly command of the medium allows the viewer to enter the mind of a man driven to hallucinatory extremes fueled by his paranoid distrust. The great director Henri-Georges Clouzot wrote the screenplay in 1963 with the intent of directing it. Although this rendition is different in tone from what we could have expected from that treatment, L'Enfer still retains Clouzot's dark edge. This is a spectacularly wrought mystery and a frightening examination of one man's self-induced hell. (French with English subtitles)