Putting the golden age of spy cinema into a quivering nuclear reactor, Reflection in a Dead Diamond isn’t your average throwback. Only those familiar with filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s previous features—their last being 2017’s hallucinatory Western Let the Corpses Tan—will be somewhat ready for what lies ahead in this espionage ecstasy pill. Everyone else can press play and hold on for dear life.
Ostensibly, the film tells the story a former secret agent living his twilight years at a flashy hotel on the Côte d’Azur. When the woman next door vanishes, her disappearance triggers memories of his past and the mystery of the one deadly assassin who eluded him.
But nothing’s straightforward in Reflection in a Dead Diamond. A sword battle isn’t a static shot with two people swinging blades. It’s a sharp eye-movement and the sound of rushing footsteps, then a quick cut to a slicing motion, followed by a gushing spray of blood. A wearable camera isn’t some hat with a hidden lense tucked in it. It’s a lavish dress draped with coins, each one recording its vantage point, and inexplicable able to playback its footage to whoever views it at just the right angle.
That space in your brain that pieces two separate things together to imply an action? This film lives there.
Cattet and Forzani capture not just the look of early James Bond features but the fantasy of it. There’s the travelogue side to the adventure, the perverted dream of unbridled wealth, the sexual desire for a dangerous lover, and the allure of being a badass action star. Once you’ve settled into the nostalgia of it all with its prominent film grain, classic score, and swingin’ sixties production, the film contorts those comfy memories with an accelerating descent into cinematic madness.
Does it all make sense? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but it all stays true to the character’s experience of questioning himself and his history. Taking every opportunity to creatively dazzle in every minute of its hour-and-a-half runtime, you always feel that Cattet and Forzani know exactly what they’re creating.
The film makes for a great end-of-the-year addition to streaming service Shudder. While not a massive player in the market, Shudder’s distinct voice as a platform for horror fans makes it one to cherish, and Reflection shows its willingness to expand its genre offering.
And it’s not Shudder’s final exclusive for 2025. That honour goes to Influencers, the sequel to 2023’s cult hit featuring a breakout performance from Cassandra Naud as a deadly identity thief who preys on influencers wanting to experience something “real.” Moving from Thailand to Southern France, Variety considers the follow-up a “worthy sequel that maintains the original’s upscale gloss and narrative twistiness while adding a sufficient number of new wrinkles.”
Influencers
Reflection and Influencers come hot off the heels of three more critically acclaimed Shudder exclusives. Good Boy, a haunted house horror centred on the perspective of a dog, became a true indie hit during its cinema run, and The Ugly Stepsister, a delightfully demented body horror twist on the classic Cinderella tale, made the streaming shoe fit after a critic- and crowd-pleasing film festival run. And then there’s The Rule of Jenny Pen, a recent winner at the New Zealand Screen Awards, which saw Geoffrey Rush play a curmudgeon stuck in a rest home housing a chillingly crazed John Lithgow.
Staple Shudder series also made a pronounced return in 2025. The Creep Tapes, an episodic continuing of Mark Duplass’s tiny-and-mighty films, delivered its second season just a month ago while fellow found footage franchise V/H/S treated its fanbase to one of its most warmly received entries with V/H/S/Halloween. The creators of the Slasher series also came out with another show, Hell Motel, which puts 10 true crime obsessives into the same dodgy residence where they get taken out one by one.
Fréwaka
Dead Mail
The platform continued to drop hidden gems throughout the year like slow-burn resurrection horror The Surrender, Gaelic folk horror Fréwaka, Japanese WWII horror Monster Island, and retro kidnapping thriller Dead Mail. Aided by a continuing build-up of genre classics—Vampire Hunter D, Shutter, Long Weekend to name a few—2025 has shown once again that Shudder’s streaming library is one to keep a constant eye on.
