Diabolique

Diabolique (Les Diaboliques, 1955) is Henri-Georges Clouzot's French suspense thriller, and you can watch it online on iFILM. The wife and the mistress of a hated boarding-school headmaster plot to kill him together, then watch the body vanish.

Michel Delassalle rules a shabby provincial school through fear, bullying the pupils, tormenting his fragile wife Christina, who actually owns the place, and flaunting his affair with the teacher Nicole. Pushed past their limit, the two rivals become partners in murder. They drown Michel in a bathtub over a long weekend, haul the corpse back to the school, and sink it in the drained swimming pool to fake an accident. When the pool is emptied, the body is gone, and Christina starts seeing signs that the dead man is somehow still around.

Clouzot guarded the ending so fiercely that the closing card begged audiences not to spoil it. The film famously pushed Hitchcock toward Psycho and remains a benchmark for suspense built on dread rather than gore, with Vera Clouzot and Simone Signoret tightening the screws in cold black and white. A patient, merciless classic for viewers who like a trap that closes one slow notch at a time. Stream Diabolique online on iFILM.