Chabrol owes a debt to Hitchcock, but there are significant differences between their universes. Chabrol himself in recent interviews has not missed an opportunity to suggest that Fritz Lang's films might be more important referents than Hitchcock's, and with good reason, I think. Central to the classic Hitchcock film is a sense of the tension in the relationship between pursuer and pursued—an element which is not all that important in Chabrol's films, and which he often avoids completely, as in Juste avant la nuit (Just Before Nightfall). Hitchcock's films develop a political sense because the detective so often represents the state and because the pursued is often innocent. But everyone is always guilty in Chabrol's films. This is a darker, more Langian guilt than we ever see in Hitchcock where in fact most characters are innocent. Chabrol's people, like Lang's suffer psychological guilt even when the law...