Claude Chabrol, the French director of many thrillers and dramas and other genres, is at his best when subtly but forcefully pulling the rug out from the viewer. This isn't your usual case of a romance story criss-crossed with a serial killer thriller. In fact, we're not made very much aware that there is a serial killer- save for a few mentions here and there- until halfway through the movie, and by the time we are it's full-throttle in a kind of expertly manipulated suspense, not in the usual sense but through an ominous musical score by Pierre Jansen and a movement of fluidity with the camera that tells the story sort of conventionally but not at the same time. It's a small, master's class in subverting the genre by making us care so much about the characters even as we know they're doomed from the happy opening.
That's not to say that Chabrol has made anything that can't be enjoyed by one looking for a good entertaining thriller first and foremost. If anything the opening of the movie is what lures one in perfectly, as it's a very jovial in this wedding sequence one sees guests school-teacher Helene (Stephane Audran, Chabrol regular) and butcher Paul (Jean Yanne, perfect as the butcher), enjoying themselves and making good conversation. This stretches out into the first half of the film; a friendship develops around food that Paul brings over, and it's only when Paul thinks its time to go the 'next step' that he's told it can't be because of a past horrible relationship that Helen faced- horrible in the sense of disappointment. There's a disconnect emotionally that is left open, thus, going into the second half of the film, where finally we see what some of us would be waiting for: the serial killer plot.
There's a string of murders involving women, and one of them- the bride from the opening- is a shocker not exactly for the revelation itself, per-say, but how Chabrol builds up to it. At first it's seen as the most suspenseful thing in the film so far as Helen leads her class along a mountainside and stops to have lunch. The music is playing right here, and it's really chilling for how simple it lays out the tension, like a weirdo standing across the street in a black cloak acting suspicious but, at the same time, too subtle to pin down. This adds to the sudden shock, then, after the music stops and finally the reveal happens via blood dripping on the kid's sandwich. This, however, is just one example of Chabrol's calm mastery as a director of the material.
It would be one thing to go on and on about the eerie absorption of the camera-work, which goes between conventional stylization (for a French film of the period) and poetic editing and framing. Or to go on and on about the stunning work turned by Audran (going between an entire emotional palette, as it were, from happy to sobbing to frightened to pale and shot to hell) and Yanne (also great at what he's meant to be, our male protagonist and, sadly, eventual antagonist by default). But it's the emotional struggle that makes this compelling above all other good reasons to recommend.
The Butcher posits a relationship that is platonic, naturalistic, and genuinely interesting; these aren't cookie-cutter characters but well-drawn and with things that make them identifiable even as they, early on, seem to go on about trivial things not related to the plot (a little like a Woody Allen movie). Then, when it switches gears bit by bit and the paranoia increases, by the time the climax comes it becomes very, ultimately, tragic. Chabrol goes to lengths to reveal, simply, the soul of a man one should not feel any sympathy for. That one close-up in the car ride to the hospital is one of the finest climaxes I might ever see in a movie from Europe, even anywhere. And damned if isn't representative of what Chabrol can do as a craftier but no less true-to-his-art member of the Cashier du cinema filmmaker club. A+