EXCLUSIVELY AT IFI

There have been rip-offs (Fatal Attraction, for one), there’s been a dire Sharon Stone remake (Diabolique), but nothing has ever surpassed Henri-Georges Clouzot’s marvellous boarding-school thriller Les diaboliques, which is re-released in new digital version.

Michel (Paul Meurisse), the principal, is such a loathsome individual that his former mistress (Simone Signoret, quite something) and his wife Vera Clouzot (the tyrannical director’s long-suffering missus) have decided to do him in, planning to pass off the killing as an accidental drowning. All seems to go well, but then evidence begins to suggest that the dead man may not be quite as deceased as they thought . . . From the twisted minds of novelists Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (on whose work Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was also based), this is a deliciously detailed, cherishably seedy exercise in knife-edge suspense. If Psycho made you think twice about the shower, you might not fancy a bath after this one . . . (Notes by Trevor Johnston).