La Cérémonie

La Cérémonie (1995) is Claude Chabrol's tightly wound French thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Sophie, a new maid hired by the well-heeled Lelièvre family, barely speaks — and the silence around her carries weight from the first frame.

At the local post office she meets Jeanne, a provocateur who has her own grievances against the Lelièvres. Sandrine Bonnaire plays Sophie's controlled blankness against Isabelle Huppert's crackling volatility, and the combination is genuinely unsettling. Jean-Pierre Cassel and Jacqueline Bisset round out the household with the kind of cheerful obliviousness that looks, in retrospect, like complacency.

Chabrol — called the French Hitchcock for good reason — builds his film as a slow-burning study of class resentment rather than a conventional chase. No jump scares, no wasted scenes. La Cérémonie took the Silver Lion at Venice and earned Bonnaire a César Award for Best Actress. Stream the film online on iFILM.