Name: The Unfaithful Wife
Director: Claude Chabrol
Released: 1969
Duration: 98 min

Suspicion, murder and psychosexual paranoia abound in this twisted thriller from French New Wave titan Claude Chabrol, led by a coolly enigmatic performance from Stéphane Audran.

In this exquisitely calibrated homage to Hitchcock, Parisian insurance executive Charles Desvallées (Michel Bouquet, Night and Fog, MIFF 1966) begins to suspect that his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) is having an affair, sending him into an escalating state of paranoia – and towards a plan that will rupture the bourgeois calm of their existence.

With its chilly surfaces, precision staging and dark humour, this deliciously deviant drama finds the great Claude Chabrol (A Story of Women, MIFF 1989; The Butcher, MIFF 1973) on signature form, with the filmmaker’s then-wife Audran (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, MIFF 2000; Les Biches) delivering a glamourous, emotionally opaque performance that’s ripe with depth and mystery. Critically acclaimed but initially unsuccessful with audiences, The Unfaithful Wife has gone on to become one of Chabrol’s most enduring and influential works, serving as the inspiration for both Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s recent Cannes Grand Prix winner Minotaur (MIFF 2026).

“One of Chabrol's mid-period masterpieces, a brilliantly ambivalent scrutiny of bourgeois marriage and murder that juggles compassion and cynicism in a way that makes Hitchcock look obvious.” – Time Out

This screening will be introduced by writer and editor Daniella Shreir (Another Gaze), who will host a panel discussion with critics Philippa Hawker and Indigo Bailey following the film.

Daniella Shreir is the founder and co-editor of film journal Another Gaze and a translator of literature, including work for The Paris Review and Granta and her award-winning translation of Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs. She has served on the selection committee for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and written for publications such as London Review of Books and Cahiers du Cinéma.

Philippa Hawker is a writer on film and the arts whose recent writing has appeared in Inside Story, The Saturday Paper, The Age and Australian Book Review. She was formerly a film reviewer and arts writer at The Age, film writer at The Australian, literary editor at The Sunday Herald and editor at Cinema Papers, and taught creative writing at RMIT and the School of Studies in the Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts. She is working on a book about Jean-Pierre Léaud.

Indigo Bailey is a Tasmanian critic and fiction writer living in Naarm/Melbourne. She is the managing editor of the online film publication Rough Cut, and has written for HEAT, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Island Magazine, among other publications.