What a dizzying new spy thriller took from Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress

'It was a real revolution in storytelling,' says Reflection in a Dead Diamond co-director Bruno Forzani

Watching Reflection in a Dead Diamond is like falling down a rabbit hole lined with images from every spy movie you’ve ever seen, and a thousand you probably haven’t. Inspired by the Eurospy movement — the ’60s era of stylized, sexy, spoofy European movies satirizing James Bond, and drawing from Italy’s adults-only fumetti neri comics — Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s film opens with an old man sitting by the beach at a seaside resort, where the gleam in the diamond nipple ring of a topless sunbather sends him off on a dizzying reverie about his time as a super-spy.

Or maybe he’s remembering his time as an actor playing a super-spy in a movie franchise? Or he’s a creator of Italian comics about a super-spy, recalling his own plotlines? Or he’s a super-spy drugged and hypnotized by an adversary who’s made him believe he’s just an old man on the beach? Or maybe he’s just an ordinary old man daydreaming about a more glamorous, exciting life than the one he actually led? The kaleidoscopic story, with one dramatic adventure melting into another, deliberately hints at many different plotlines, allowing for many interpretations. Anime fans in particular may recognize the approach from a classic favorite: Satoshi Kon’s 2001 anime movie Millennium Actress, which Cattet and Forzani cite as an inspiration.

Kon is the director of Perfect Blue, Toyko Godfathers, and Paprika, among other projects, but Millennium Actress was the breakout movie that made him an international star. In the film, an aging film star looks back on her life in a career-retrospective interview, but as she talks to a journalist, her movie roles, personal history, and fantasies increasingly blur together in a riot of ecstatic colorful imagery.

“When we [first] saw this movie, it was a blast, because it was a new way to tell a story,” Forzani told Polygon after an advance screening of Reflection at 2025’s Fantastic Fest. “But as it's an animation movie, it hasn't the place [in cinematic history] it should have. For us, it was a real revolution in storytelling.”

Cattet and Forzani’s filmography is built around this kind of subjective, hypnotic genre exploration: Their movies Amer (2009) and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013) take similarly dreamlike, fractal approaches to giallo horror, while 2017’s Let the Corpses Tan remixes imagery and ideas from classic spaghetti Westerns into a violent heist thriller packed with double and triple crosses. All of these movies have a hint of Kon’s approach, in terms of presenting stories that cross into each other, and might even seem to contradict each other. Forzani says that’s what he and Cattet most learned from watching Kon’s movie 25 years ago.

“When you read a book, you have your own imagination interact with the book,” he says. “But in cinema, most of the time, it's very driven, it's very straightforward, always overexplained. You don't have a place, as the audience, for your imagination. When we saw Millennium Actress, we had that feeling that our imagination could interact with the film, so each spectator, each viewer, can have a different interpretation of the movie.”

Their new movie has other cultural touchstones as well, always in the same spirit of requiring audience interpretation or interaction, rather than encouraging passive viewing.

“We saw the TV show Westworld, and it was the same [non-linear] approach to the storytelling,” Forzani says. “That's why we wanted to make this movie. Our previous movie, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears, it's that kind of narrative storytelling, but it's more linked to subconscious and surrealism. It's more like David Lynch, maybe, because David Lynch is a big influence, too. The first time we saw Lost Highway was a real cinematographic experience. I was 16 years old, I think, something like that. I didn't understand what happened [in the movie], but I had a real experience of cinema, and it marked me a lot. It's a film that stays inside you all your life, and when you revisit it, you find new keys and things like that. It's not a product, it's real art and cinema. It's not content, it's a movie.”

Westworld also helped them understand how to approach Reflection in a Dead Diamond in terms of structure.

“It's the different layers of narrative,” Cattet says. “This time, we wrote the script with a very technical approach, with different colors for the different layers of narrative. We could have distance, and we could see how all those narratives respond to each other, interact with each other. And like this, we can construct the different interpretations, different themes.”

Millennium Actress, though, was more of an inspiration in terms of figuring out how to tell a story built around a single character, but not a single set storyline.

“Millennium Actress is the same thing as Westworld — it can be about this actress, or about the story of Japan, or the story of Japanese cinema,” Forzani says. “There's a mystery that she wants to solve. Here, this mystery is done through Serpentik, the antagonist. And we have made her very metaphorical. She's not just a villain. She can be several things for the hero. She's the key of the film. She has a lot of masks, and a lot of faces.”

Forzani says approaching stories through this fractal lens is a way of getting back to the fantasy elements he and Cattet love about Eurospy movies, and don’t see in modern spy blockbusters.

“Nowadays, superhero movies, spy movies are always told the same way,” he says. “Back in the '60s, in this Eurospy era and the fumetti universe, it was more of a gray zone. It's not [about] good and evil, it was more a blur. And we like that. To revisit them today, it's a bit of fresh air. These movies are very psychedelic, very pop. The gadgets were a bit magic. Nowadays, the gadgets are just technology. There's no more of this kind of craziness. It was fun to revisit that.”

Ultimately, he and Cattet hope the movie’s overwhelming barrage of images, plotlines, action, sex, and alternate readings will

encourage viewers to engage their intellect about what’s really going on — but maybe not the first time through.

“For us, there are two ways to watch it,” he says. “The first time, it's a pure experience, and you have to switch your brain off and feel it. You let the film enter inside you, okay? […] You have this roller coaster thing, and voilà — I wish you'd have a kind of orgasm watching it. And after, you can revisit it a second time, a third time, and see all the details, because there are several ways to interpret the movie. It’s like a labyrinth game.”

“We want to be physical, to be really visceral,” Cattet says. “We want to touch the intuition of the audience.”

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Reflection in a Dead Diamond is now streaming on Shudder and AMC Plus.