Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime (1/9/26–6/10/26)

This autumn BFI celebrates Claude Chabrol’s cool, precise, entertaining and deliciously wicked thrillers with a BFI Southbank season, Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime, running from 1 September–6 October, including the BFI Distribution rerelease of La Femme infidèle (1969) in the UK and Ireland on 11 September. The first of Chabrol’s great run of bourgeois psychological thrillers, La Femme infidèle is one of three of the director’s films that BFI Distribution has acquired: Le Boucher (1970) and Les Biches (1968) will also be available. A curated Chabrol BFI Player online collection will also be available for audiences UK-wide.

A number of films in the season are screening on 35mm. Often cited as the first French New Wave film, Chabrol’s first feature Le Beau Serge (1958) announced its director's preoccupation with the darker side of human nature. Shot on location in his mother’s hometown, the film uncovers violence and despair in the ordinary everydayness of provincial life. The Hatter’s Ghost (1982, pictured below), Chabrol’s underrated and often overlooked adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel, stars French screen legends Michel Serrault and Charles Aznavour as two men playing a murderous game of cat and mouse.

The Cry of the Owl (1987) is a thrilling adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, where the boundaries between victim and perpetrator blur when the object of a man’s voyeuristic gaze looks back. Chabrol is arguably at his most Hitchcockian here in this homage to Rear Window. The Bridesmaid (2004) stars Benoît Magimel as a shy, somewhat passive young man who meets a woman at his sister’s wedding, falling hopelessly into an all-consuming affair. La Rupture (1970) finds Chabrol working in a more overtly melodramatic mode—and all the more disturbing and unhinged for it—in a film about the institutions that fail women.

Other titles in the season include À double tour (1959), a lurid and transgressive adaptation of Stanley Ellin’s novel starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, which prefigures the look and feel of later Hitchcockian thrillers. The Third Lover (1962) is a precise study in voyeurism and manipulation that anticipates the claustrophobic domestic dramas that would define Chabrol’s greatest period to come. Les Biches (1968), a gender-swapping riff on The Talented Mr Ripley, is a polarising work, with a story that mines the seduction of privilege and marks the beginning of Chabrol’s creative and personal partnership with Stéphane Audran.

Source/images: BFI

Lady (Samuel Abrahams, 2025)

As the great ethnographic documentarian Jean Rouch once pointed out, people will always be affected by the presence of a camera, and the relationship between filmmaker and subject is at the heart of Samuel Abrahams' terrific mockumentary Lady, which was a late—but most welcome—addition to the 2025 London Film Festival.  Abrahams' film, which received its world premiere at the LFF, features a standout performance from Sian Clifford, hitherto best known as the older sister of the title character in BBC TV series Fleabag.  In Lady, Clifford plays fame-hungry aristocrat Lady Isabella Ravenhyde, who has invited filmmaker Sam (Laurie Kynaston) into her huge stately mansion for a fly-on-the-wall documentary.

Once this setup is established, Lady shifts into unexpectedly surreal territory as Isabella notices that she is gradually becoming invisible.  As this strange affliction begins to consume more of her body, Isabella grows increasingly desperate—not so much because of her condition, which she seems largely resigned to, but because she wants to be seen and recognised for her creative talents before vanishing completely.  Isabella considers herself to be a serious multidisciplinary artist, so for one final tilt at artistic validation, she decides to enter the annual talent contest she hosts for local children and, with Sam's dubious help, sets about planning a bizarre avant-garde dance sequence that she hopes will win first place.

Of course, as far as Sam is concerned, this is all grist to the mill, but his own professional and personal insecurities—neither of which are helped by Isabella's near-constant flirting—begin to bubble to the surface.  As both Lady and Sam's film progress, Isabella slowly changes from a caricature to a real, damaged person with a quite moving backstory, and she and Sam form a genuine closeness that seemed highly unlikely when the filmmaker—who one would assume is a proxy for Abrahams—first arrived at his idiosyncratic subject's door.  While there are no shortage of very funny moments in the film, it's underscored by a pathos that gradually comes to the fore as the suitably nightmarish children's talent show draws nearer.

Abrahams films the magnificent Somerleyton Hall, which stands in for Isabella's grand, sprawling home, Ravenhyde Hall, as a sad, gloomy and increasingly eerie place, one that seems to reflect the essential melancholy of its narcissistic owner.  Isabella seems oddly chained to the estate, and a scene in which she and Sam attempt to leave by car is initially played for laughs before unfolding into something more sinister; here, as in the entire film, the tonal shifts are handled quite superbly.  It is not difficult to equate the fortysomething Isabella's physical evaporation with society's firm emphasis on youth and beauty; but, like its wholly mesmerising title character, this fizzing, unique film very much demands to be seen.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Raindance 2026: Paul

The idiosyncratic Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté has carved out a singular place in contemporary cinema, building films that feel at once austere, playful, and quietly disarming.  Working largely from the margins of Québec's film industry, he gravitates toward characters who exist just outside the rhythms of ordinary life—hermits, drifters, workers, people whose inner worlds are more vivid than their surroundings.  His style is deceptively simple: long, patient takes; a wry sense of humour that never tips into mockery; and a fascination with the textures of everyday spaces.  Yet beneath that calm surface, his films pulse with curiosity about how people construct meaning when no one is watching.

Côté's work resists easy categorisation, but that’s precisely its appeal: each film feels like an invitation to observe, to linger, and to reconsider what a story can be.  His latest film, Paul—a documentary that screens on Wednesday and Thursday at this year's Raindance Film Festival—certainly adheres to this template as it follows the subject of the title, an introverted thirtysomething Montrealer doing all he can to change his life.  The bilingual Paul is looking to improve both his mental and physical wellbeing, and a large chunk of his week is spent deep-cleaning apartments, each invariably owned by a bossy woman who puts Paul through his paces as he scrubs away at the bathroom and kitchen until they shine.

Paul receives a great deal of pleasure from this work—but no payment.  It’s clear that the therapeutic benefits are what drive him, and he uploads videos of his vigorous cleaning sessions to Instagram, where he’s been gaining quite a following (which brings its own kind of anxiety).  We watch Paul’s films within Côté’s film, and as Paul unfolds we see its subject becoming increasingly adept at shooting and editing his reels—perhaps a result of spending time with a seasoned filmmaker?  The late nights he spends assembling these videos earn him a scolding from one particular maîtresse, who doesn’t seem to appreciate that a long day of cleaning leaves Paul only a few hours to catch up on his fledgling work as an influencer.

Early in the film, Paul openly admits to blocking out memories of much of his past life, and it’s as safe as it is sad to assume that he was often an object of ridicule.  Yet Côté’s approach is always non‑judgmental, and while he’s not afraid to sprinkle humour throughout, it is never at his subject’s expense.  As the film progresses, it does verge on the repetitive as Paul ricochets from one gruelling domme‑led cleaning assignment to the next, but for the most part this is a sensitive and absorbing portrait of someone navigating a daunting world, one in which he is more or less invisible.  Yet Paul is underscored by a growing sense of optimism, and Denis Côté expertly captures his subject’s hopeful longing for connection.

Darren Arnold

Images: Métropole Films