Credited with making the first French New Wave feature—though of course such status is perpetually up for debate—Claude Chabrol produced a widely eclectic filmography that sets him apart from his Cahiers du cinéma peers. Just like his morally gray characters, it is difficult to pin a label on Chabrol, both inside and outside of cinema. With a penchant for and an appreciation of genre filmmaking, the auteur did everything from pulpy crime films to war dramas. This unstoppable energy denotes a kind of joie-de-vivre in creating, which speaks to another facet of the director’s charm: Chabrol the Gourmet, the Bon-vivant. In this series of Chabrol’s post-New Wave, overlooked suspense thrills, we see how the director’s films are imbued with the same pleasures elicited by a good, hefty meal: delicious satisfaction, with a to-be-expected touch of gut discomfort!

The style of Chabrol’s later suspense films is endlessly fascinating in its sardonic naturalism. Ditching askew angles and low-key lighting, Chabrol opted for a kind of “flat” cinematography that perfectly captures a seemingly respectable, civilized bourgeois façade. Perversely, and delightfully, the sophisticated mise-en-scène would peel off to lay bare twisted impulses. Obsession, adultery, even murder: Chabrol’s characters have done them all. No wonder that, following the icy Stéphane Audran, star of his earlier films, Isabelle Huppert became yet another quintessential Chabrolian woman whose glacial exteriors mask a torrent of dark psychological impulses. To enjoy Chabrol’s films is to savor watching the ice crack, the masks slip, and secrets spill out of their stylish containers. As Chabrol cheekily put it, the characters in his films eat because, with their mouths full, they can no longer lie!