James Bond Meets Quentin Tarantino in This Cult Classic Spy Thriller

Published Oct 1, 2026, 11:03 PM EDT

Erik Hawkins is an award-winning writer and editor who's been obsessed with cinema since he was old enough to hold Roger Ebert's Video Home Companion in his hands. He lives in NYC, where he rabidly watches everything from the newest releases to the more odd and obscure, and regularly shares his thoughts on Letterboxd. From ghost-writing fiction and webisodes in South America to local news, trial coverage, and politics in NYC, he's rarely put down his laptop over the past 15 years.

For almost 20 years, French directing duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have been quietly producing some of the most genuinely insane, unforgettable genre films of all time. And from their trippy, ultra-eroticized giallo films Amer and The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears to the sun-baked, bullet-riddled spaghetti western/Poliziotteschi of 2017's Let the Corpses Tan, they've shown a genuine understanding of genre and the tactility of cinema that's rivaled only by Quentin Tarantino.

Last year, they applied their hyper-stylized, dreamlike, and bloody craftsmanship to the classic spy thriller with what's perhaps their masterpiece: Reflection in a Dead Diamond. Ostensibly the story of aging superspy John Diman (Fabio Testi) living out his retirement in a luxury French Riviera hotel, the film is best described as a dive into the bloody, glittering, sexually deviant subconscious and memories of James Bond. It's simultaneously every spy film ever made and nothing like any of them, and its audiovisual richness would put Tarantino himself to shame. Luckily for US audiences, it's also currently streaming on Shudder.

'Reflection In a Dead Diamond' Must Be Experienced to Be Believed

Cattet and Forzani's film synthesizes decades worth of Bond and Euro-sleaze cinema tropes into a whirlwind tour of a brutal spy's life and work. While it features cars outfitted with machine guns, a seductress clad entirely in glittering camera lenses, bloody katana slashings, gadgets, euphoric nude scenes, false faces, and plenty of leather catsuits, it aims to deliver its story entirely via sound and image that functions as a cinematic bullet directly into the viewer's skull. The brutality and misogyny of John Diman (he might as well have been named Bond or Diabolik) and his work is never shied away from, with Reflection in a Dead Diamond deliberately recreating and enhancing the uglier aspects of early Bond pictures, as well as the genre cinema of Italian masters like Mario Bava.

It's all done to a psychedelic degree that will have certain viewers levitating out of their seats. Faces are infinitely refracted through diamonds and in a hilariously escalating bit, Mission: Impossible face masks are ripped off one after another ... after another. The film's action and violence are cut to ribbons via expressive editing, with Bond intro/Saul Bass-style colorful silhouettes portraying some of the more outrageous acts. Its main villain is a shapeshifting seductress named Serpentik who possesses the power to hypnotize victims into believing they are starring in a film. It's undoubtedly the boldest, most expressive and wild stuff to ever hit the spy genre.

The Film Is the Closest We'll Get to James Bond via Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino has made no secret over the years of the fact that he'd love to direct a standalone Bond picture drawing from Ian Fleming's original novels. The prospect of Tarantino's fetishistic love of film history and the tactile brutality cinema can convey being applied to the 007 series is thrilling — but, with that unlikely to happen, Reflection In a Dead Diamond is almost certainly the closest we'll get. The film's graphic bloodletting, extreme close-ups, and throwback score are incredibly evocative of the tricks Tarantino used to jazz-up the Kill Bill films, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained.

Beyond the film's multilayered, psychedelic visual tricks, Reflection In a Dead Diamond also boasts some of the most detailed sound design you'll find outside of an explicitly arthouse film ... or Tarantino. Leather squeaks and crunches exquisitely loudly. Diamonds grind into that same leather as well as flesh. It's all so fetishistically detailed as to border on ASMR, and lends every act, especially the violent ones, a visceral tactility that's unheard of in the spy genre. And that's before we get to the immolations and katana murders ...

Longtime fans of both Tarantino and the spy genre are sure to find plenty to love in Reflection In a Dead Diamond, once they accept that they're buckling in for a rollercoaster ride through the subconscious, rather than a traditional espionage story. It's got more sex, violence, opulence, and dazzling visuals than a single film can almost sustain — and it's easily one of the best films of 2025. It's streaming today on Shudder.

Cast

• 

  Fabio Testi

  John Diman (Old)

• Yannick Renier

  John Diman (Young)

• Koen De Bouw

  Markus Strand

• Thi-Mai Nguyen

  Serpentik