The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013) (14/25)

Dan (Klaus Tange) can’t find his wife. Like anyone would, he goes around asking if his neighbors have seen her, and from there filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani suck you into an infinite nightmare vortex. There are terrible stories to be told in every apartment in this luscious, historic building, and there’s probably a murderer in at least one of them. And even the instantly gripping missing persons story seems tame compared to a bizarre interlude about an elderly couple with a hole in their ceiling.

The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears takes its inspiration from the Italian Giallo genre, an operatic string of serial killer/detective stories about outlandish violence and total madness. Cattet and Forzani don’t stop there: they use the Giallo as a springboard for a kaleidoscopic descent into madness, subverting the rules of the form whilst simultaneously launching it into the stratosphere. The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is one of the most visually dazzling films of the century, and it’s all in the service of a shocking tale of murder and psychological ruin.