The Legendary Anime Director Behind 2025’s Most Mind‑Bending Spy Film

Image: Shudder

Watching Reflection in a Dead Diamond is like stepping into a mirrored funhouse of spy cinema — an intoxicating collage that borrows from familiar espionage tropes and from a raft of stranger, more marginal influences. The film wears its debt to the 1960s Eurospy craze on its sleeve — that stylish, sexy European riff on Bond — and also nods to Italy’s adult-oriented fumetti neri comics. It opens with an older man on a seaside terrace, and a glint from a diamond nipple ring sends him careening into a delirious chain of memories and fantasies about a life steeped in espionage and spectacle.

Is he really a retired secret agent recalling missions? An actor who once embodied a screen spy? A cartoonist remembering made-up adventures? Or an ordinary man rewinding toward imagined grandeur? The film deliberately resists a single explanation: one episode dissolves into the next, inviting multiple readings. That layered, memory-driven method will feel familiar to anime fans — the structure owes a clear debt to Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress, which similarly folds fiction, memory, and fantasy together into a luminous, collaged reverie.

Satoshi Kon — director of films such as Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika — made Millennium Actress the kind of work that rearranged how people thought about animated storytelling. In Kon’s movie, an aging star’s recollections of roles, romances, and ambitions merge into a kaleidoscope of images, producing a viewing experience that’s as much felt as understood.

Image: Shudder

“When we first saw Millennium Actress, it felt like a revelation — a new way to shape narrative,” Bruno Forzani said after an advance screening at Fantastic Fest in 2025. For him and Hélène Cattet, Kon’s film suggested animation (and cinema generally) could leave more room for the viewer’s imagination rather than spelling everything out in service of a single, linear plot.

Cattet and Forzani have made a career of demanding that same imaginative participation. Their earlier films — Amer (2009) and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013) — revisit giallo’s fevered aesthetics, while 2017’s Let the Corpses Tan grafts spaghetti-western iconography onto a violent caper. Each picture trades in sensory, elliptical storytelling: images pile up, meanings shift, and the viewer completes the narrative in the spaces between shots.

“Reading a book lets your imagination co-author the story,” Forzani observes. “Cinema too often overexplains. Watching Millennium Actress reminded us that movies can leave blanks for the audience to fill.”

Image: Shudder

The new film gathers other cultural reference points — from the nested timelines of Westworld to the dreamlogic of David Lynch’s work — and folds them into a deliberately non-linear architecture. Cattet says they mapped the screenplay with a color-coded system to track the film’s multiple narrative registers so the sequences could echo and refract one another, producing a web of possible interpretations.

Forzani compares the design to revisiting a labyrinth: each viewing reveals more intersections and hidden passages. Characters such as the antagonist Serpentik are intentionally protean — a symbolic key rather than a one-dimensional villain — so the hero’s relationship with her can shift from metaphor to mirror to threat depending on the scene.

Image: Shudder

Part of the film’s pleasure is its retro-futurist sensibility: it reaches back to the playful, psychedelic gadgetry and moral ambiguity of Eurospy and fumetti, rather than the slick, technocratic logic of contemporary blockbusters. That willingness to embrace whimsy, color, and moral grayness gives the movie a distinctive, pop-psychedelic energy.

Image: Shudder

Ultimately, Cattet and Forzani hope the film does two things at once: overwhelm the senses and invite deeper analysis. Forzani describes two distinct modes of viewing — the first is purely visceral, surrendering to the film’s sensory rush; subsequent watches reveal the structural details, recurring motifs, and alternate meanings hidden in the seams. “It’s like a labyrinth,” he says — a movie you can ride, then later unpack.

“We want the work to be physical and immediate,” Cattet adds. “Our aim is to touch the audience’s intuition as much as their intellect.”

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

Source: Polygon