Dr. Petiot

In occupied Paris a doctor offers Jews trying to escape the Nazis a route to Argentina. He takes payment up front, administers the injection he says the journey requires, then strips his visitors of everything they carry and burns the bodies in the cellar of his house. The film tells this not as a thriller but as a dark carnival: Michel Serrault's Petiot, with his cape and his hurrying walk, is almost a figure from silent cinema. Marcel Petiot was real. He was caught after the war, convicted of twenty-six murders and executed in 1946, having argued in his defence that the people he killed were collaborators. Christian de Chalonge's visual language leans on German Expressionism rather than Impressionism: canted angles, hard shadows, warped spaces. Serrault's performance carries the whole weight of the film.