2025 Catch-Up: Reflection in a Dead Diamond; The Long Walk

One dutifully upholds its genre conventions while the other thrillingly rips them apart.

REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND

James Bond has held his dominant perch in pop culture for so long that every other suave super-spy can only wilt before the instantly recognizible silhouettes of Connery, Brosnan, Craig, etc. As far as this specific archetype goes, Bond tops all. Yet, when I watched the Bond-inflected Reflection in a Dead Diamond, which you should check out when it hits Shudder in December, I was struck by the bleak reminder of how bland and largely toothless the franchise has been for decades — and that we still have Bond’s Amazon era to look forward to, too. Tribute, pastiche, homage, whatever label you want to slap on it, Reflection in a Dead Diamond looks and feels like an unofficial yet superior bootleg of the real thing, free to chase the extremes of the fabled spy’s violence, sexuality, and ever-shifting identity with a freedom we simply do not associate with that world-famous brand with its adorable double-0 license to kill. It’s said that Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale flirted with the arthouse; this one seduces it.

Rife with Seventies Hong Kong snap-zooms, Leone-flavored close-ups, sequences of extreme brutality shot and edited to nigh-abstraction, all punctuated with vivid, inventively deployed colors, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s film feels alive in a way Bond hasn’t in ages. How best to describe it: It’s almost as if the visually playful Bond title cards, the series’ hallmark, were the entire feature instead of the credits. Set in a scenic seaside hotel where an aged secret agent (Fabio Testi) waits out his lonely remaining days far removed from sex and explosions, Diamond immediately locks in with the narrative efficiency of a pulp novella: our idle spy sips cocktails as a gorgeous woman sunbathes near the coastline, her bare chest glistening with diamonds which send him spiraling down memory lane to his most consequential mission against the elusive assassin known only as “Serpentik.”

From here, Cattet and Forzani take Bond’s iconography — the Baccarat tables, the beautiful femme fatales, the sports car with gun turrets behind the headlamps — and dismantle it, infusing their spin with the freaky flavor of the Giussanis’ Diabolik and other notable Italo-European comic strips, with shades of Milo Manara and Guido Crepax glimmering in the film’s many dazzling facets. (These lush influences are so prominent that the movie’s own attempts at comic art, used where expensive action sequences might have gone, feel comparatively flat.) The sights are a wonder, but the sound design is something, too: the pull of a leather jumpsuit as a body tenses for a brawl, the crunch of a lead pipe against bone, that fucked-up sound glass makes when it’s pushed into flesh, it’s all rendered with a fidelity to the many textures and dimensions of international intrigue writ large. Ridiculous yet immaculate images that both reflect and refract legend, distorting the bland competence of cinema’s most famous examples of espionage to indelible funhouse proportions.

9 / 10

Reflection in a Dead Diamond will stream exclusively on Shudder beginning December 5.

Written and directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani.
Starring Fabio Testi, Yannick Renier, Koen De Bouw, Maria de Medeiros, and Thi Mai Nguyen.

87 mins. / Unrated. I haven’t seen hooks do that to someone’s skin since Hellraiser.

THE LONG WALK

For a feature-length misery trudge set at three miles per hour, The Long Walk is surprisingly fleet-footed in its presentation and a pretty damned compelling viewing experience, to boot. I can’t speak to the story as originally written by Stephen King (in his “Richard Bachman” days), and I sure wish I had never known this was once going to be directed by Frank Darabont. But Francis Lawrence (Constantine) nails the contours of this destitute post-war America, where civic pride is taught at gunpoint and public morale depends on an annual competition in which fifty boys are chosen to walk as far as they can for wealth and one life-altering wish. The catch is a doozy, too: If they stop, they die.

It’s the carrot and stick approach, and the stick is wielded by The General (Mark Hamill). And he does not spare it, keeping the boys marching ahead with fear in their hearts and their eyes on the prize. This year’s crop includes Ray (Cooper Hoffman), a soft-boiled recruit embittered by the broken system that birthed this madness, and Pete (David Jonsson), a clear-eyed optimist whose decency and inner light cut through the film’s oppressive, slate-gray despair. Given how YA dystopias have gnawed through similar conceits over the last two decades, The Long Walk risks feeling like a post-Hunger Games relic, one more exercise in gloom with a photogenic cast shuffling toward their doom.

Lawrence’s grip on pacing and tone keeps things lively. He takes a basic approach to the material, focusing more on the monotonies (and, it should be said, agonies) of the road ahead, stashing the horrors of failure largely in the rearview but keeping the threat of it ever-present. Internal complexities are relegated to flashbacks and chatter between Hoffman, Jonsson, and the largely capable cast around them, but they can only do so much within the confines of such dully competent imagery (from Jo Willems, who, guess what, shoots next year’s Hunger Games), which avoids imbuing the ceaseless visuals of pavement, trees, sky, and rural ruin with awe or imagination. So it’s left to the cast to shoulder the existential heft, and the results are a mixed bag. Hoffman strains (heroically but visibly) for gravity, while Judy Greer, in a sliver of a role, devastates with the raw emotions of despair and hope that eventually define the story. Unsurprisingly, Jonsson (who impressed me in Alien: Romulus) walks away with the whole production, lending warmth to his character’s bracing endurance and grace. The Long Walk might traverse a fallen nation’s further collapse at a weary trot, but in Jonsson’s hands, our hearts’ pace quickens.

7 / 10

Directed by Francis Lawrence.
Screenplay by JT Mollner.
Starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Judy Greer, and Mark Hamill.

108 mins. / Rated R. The pavement becomes slick with red.