Synopsis
The Butcher (Le Boucher, 1970) is a French psychological thriller you can watch online on iFILM, made by Claude Chabrol at the peak of his control of the genre.
Bodies are turning up in the hills outside a quiet provincial village. The local schoolteacher Hélène has struck up a genuine friendship with Popaul, the butcher — a reticent, steady ex-soldier who served in Indochina and Algeria. The timeline lines up. The evidence lines up. Hélène is the last person to look. Stéphane Audran, Chabrol's wife and a constant of his best films, plays that refusal with such precise restraint that the film becomes uncomfortable in the way real life is uncomfortable.
Chabrol wasn't building a whodunit. He was asking how long a person can sustain a chosen blindness — and what the cost looks like when it ends. Stream The Butcher online on iFILM.
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