Diabolique

1996

Action / Drama / Horror / Mystery / Thriller

29
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 39% · 31 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 39% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 5.5/10 10 16244 16.2K

missing body husband wife relationship violent husband romantic rivalry plan gone wrong conspiracy

Plot summary

The wife and mistress of a cruel school master collaborate in a carefully planned and executed scheme to murder him. The plan goes well until the body, which has been strategically dumped, disappears. The psychological strain starts to weigh on the two women when a retired police investigator begins looking into the man's disappearance on a whim.

Director

Jeremiah S. Chechik Photo
Jeremiah S. Chechik

Top cast

Allen Garfield Photo
Allen Garfield as Leo Katzman
Sharon Stone Photo
Sharon Stone as Nicole Horner
Diana Bellamy Photo
Diana Bellamy as Ms. Vawze
Kathy Bates Photo
Kathy Bates as Det. Shirley Vogel
720p.BluRay 720p.WEB 1080p.BluRay 1080p.WEB
987.01 MB
1280*694
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds 4
986.59 MB
1280*714
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds 1
1.79 GB
1920*1040
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds 17
1.98 GB
1920*1072
English 5.1
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds 1

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by lemon_magic 4 / 10

Suckered by an American remake of 'Diabolique' (not that I'm bitter)

I saw that 'Diabolique' was showing on a cable movie channel, and I had heard great things about it, and so I was prepared to be impressed and intrigued, and to improve my 'cultural literacy' in the process.Instead, what I got was a draggy, lifeless 'film noir' remake with Sharon Stone and Chazz Palmintieri. The frustrating thing about the movie was that it was JUST GOOD ENOUGH and kept JUST ENOUGH of the elements of the original plot to make me hope that things would improve somehow. So I kept watching it. But it never did.I am not Sharon Stone's biggest fan, but I acknowledge that she gave a compelling performance in "Casino", and that very few actresses past or present could have played her role better. (Joan Crawford or Betty Davis, maybe). And she's a black hole of bitterness and anger here -somehow sexually inviting and repellent at the same time. That doesn't make for comfortable viewing. There's the same problem with the lesbian undercurrents between the wife and the mistress - it ought to be titillating or erotic, but it's just stale and nasty. And Chazz Palmintieri is a great character actor( see 'The Usual Suspects' or "Bullets Over Broadway"), but the character he plays is such a flat-out son-of-a-bitch that you really don't want to watch him.But the real the problem with the film is that they were going for dread and suspense, but the pacing and rhythms of each of the individual scenes was way off - empty and interminable. So the viewer wound up feeling dread and BOREDOM instead. That doesn't make for 'recommended film viewing'.I still hope to seek out the original one of these days, so at least the remake didn't spoil anything. And some one else might like this version just fine on its own merits, depending on how big a Stone fan they are (it is really her movie - her character drives the events in the plot).
Reviewed by view_and_review 2 / 10

Thanks for Nothing

"Diabolique" starts abruptly. A pale thin brunette gets out of bed, goes to the bathroom, draws a bath, and undresses. While sitting on the edge of the tub with, what I can only assume is a pensive look on her face, she begins to breathe erratically and falls to the ground. Her husband entered the bathroom and simply stood over her as though he was waiting for her to die. Soon after, a blond woman comes to the bathroom to help. At this time I don't know anything about anything. The whole scene is just bizarre.Eventually, we find out that the brunette is Mia Barand (Isabelle Adjani), the wife, the blond is Nicole Horner (Sharon Stone), the mistress, and the man is Guy Barand (Chazz Palmenteri), a philandering a-hole of a husband. The two women work together to kill Guy for all the wrongs he'd done.My assumption is that they would reveal over time why he deserved to be killed. We got glimpses of his overbearing abusive behavior to give us an idea, but nothing to make him loathed enough to be killed (or maybe it was enough to be killed). Either way, when he was killed I had not a care one way or the other if the two women were caught or they got away with it. Nicole was a sharp-tonged strumpet while Mia was this doe-eyed lost puppy. Mia had a perpetual look of lost, confused, and in need of guidance. It was pathetic and annoying.And because the writers were at a loss of how to advance the plot they dropped Kathy Bates into the movie out of nowhere. I mean literally out of nowhere. She heard that Mia was looking for her husband and decided that it would become her life's mission to find him or what happened to him. Her character made no sense as did much of this drivel. There wasn't a sympathetic character to be found and nor was the plot interesting enough to be bothered with.
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