Jean-Denis Bonan’s A Woman Kills is a late 1960s French New Wave film about a serial killer murdering prostitutes and following the execution of the convicted perpetrator, the murders continue and now the authorities are on the hunt because not only did they execute an innocent woman, as more bodies are discovered, the public pressure closes in on the real killer, who the film does a good job at creating false trails so the viewer is just as disoriented as the characters are in the film. The film will call to mind Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin and Lars Von Trier’s The Element of Crime.
I particularly loved the gritty almost German expressionistic lighting with stark inky blacks contrasting bright shades of gray. The film is a bit disconcerting and yet it is beautiful to behold with it’s scenes of urban decay contrasted with beautiful French women. There are a lot of point of view dolly and perhaps hand held point of view fluid motion shots and at times the voice overs with at times discordant jazzy music.
To state this film is not for everyone though should be noted because at times it narrates too much rather then let’s the action and images speak for themselves, but after 45 years without a distributor, Lunar Park is releasing the film in a restored high definition Blu-ray Disc for the first time ever, but this is a limited edition run so if you are looking for this film, buy it when it comes out on February 6, 2023 in the United Kingdom though it is region A and B encoded so it should run on American Blu-ray Disc Players. I viewed a screener digitally so aside from the impressions I have noted above, I cannot state how the extra features included fair, but I took some screen shots to give an idea of what it may look like since while the technology of streaming has improved, sometimes nothing matches a direct short distance high speed HDMI connection from a Blu-ray Disc to a television so results may vary.
What I can state is Jean-Denis Bonan’s A Woman Kills was exhibited with a black and white (1.37:1) aspect ration with French Language 1.0 PCM Mono sound and English Language Subtitles. Other features can be read in the press release I posted last week and is linked below.
https://genreonlinenet.blogspot.com/2023/01/jean-denis-bonans-long-lost-thriller.html
Jean-Denis Bonan’s A Woman Kills should be available at retailers on and offline on February 7, 2023.
(C) Copyright 2023 By Mark A. Rivera
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