Even more so than fellow bloviators Luca Guadagnino and Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino is mostly in the business of pitching movies these days, as opposed to actually making them. There have been so many Deadline press releases covering Tarantino’s unrealized projects over the years that they’ve justified their own Wikipedia page, ranging from recent hits like his hyper-violent Star Trek reboot and his “retirement” film about a vintage porno critic to his more classic threats to update titles like Halloween, Westworld, The Man from U.N.CL.E., Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic, and Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. One of the more promising projects in that pile of discarded drafts was Tarantino’s urge to direct the 2006 adaptation of Casino Royale, returning the pop culture image of James Bond to his 1960s roots. The project obviously went in another direction, hiring Daniel Craig to play the famous spy in a self-serious series of grim, grey thrillers set in the modern day. It’s easy to imagine the Tarantino spin on the franchise, though, with a new found extremity of violence in Bond’s international espionage, peppered with brighter colors & snappier dialogue in the stretches between world-saving kills. And thanks to the new straight-to-Shudder thriller Reflection in a Dead Diamond, it’s even easier to imagine than ever before.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond approximates what the Tarantino version of a James Bond film would’ve been like, except it’s much less talky and even more absurdly, stylishly violent than what you’re picturing. One of the details from Tarantino’s Bond pitch was that he wanted to bring back Pierce Brosnan as an older, more grizzled version of the character than the typical suave playboy type. Similarly, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is as reflective as its title suggests, casting giallo veteran Fabio Testi as an octogenarian spy who’s struggling to enjoy his retirement, since a neighboring guest at his luxury hotel on the French Riviera has triggered memories of his more exciting past. The more typically Bond-like Yannick Renier appears as the younger version of the international superspy John Diman, as memories of a violent past and the calmer facts of the present mix in what plays like Alzheimer’s induced hallucinations. The movie alternates between the two timelines at a dizzying rhythm, with Diman reliving his sado-masochistic battle with a femme fatale diamond smuggler with such urgency & ferocity that the audience quickly loses track of what’s real and what’s imagined. And that’s before we’re introduced to another past, faceless enemy who kills his targets by tricking them to believe they’re living in a genre film, executing them with the calling-card appearance of the word “Fin” — bringing in another note of Tarantino-style meta theatrics.

I do not mean to insult the creative voices of directors Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani by focusing so much on Tarantino here. Cattet & Forzani are formidable genre remixers in their own right, having kicked off the neo-giallo revival of recent years in early titles like Amer & The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears long before lesser filmmakers got there (and having moved on to reinvigorating the spaghetti Western in Let the Corpses Tan after the rest of the industry caught up to them). There’s a delirious maximalism to the couple’s filmmaking style that cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s work, even if their imagery exclusively traffics in the vintage genre ephemera of old. There have been dozens of proper James Bond films produced over the past 60 years (among other schlocky Eurospy knockoffs, some even starring Testi), and not a single one can claim to be half as visually stylish as what’s accomplished here. The screen-print silhouettes of classic Bond intros are animated in sadomasochistic fights to the death where diamonds serve as substitutes for both blood and ejaculate. Comic book panels, split-screen framing, and film projector layering rush to fill the screen with the coolest imagery possible every single moment. The blazing sun reflects off a nipple ring with the dizzying brightness of the lethal boat trip in Purple Noon. Black-leather ninja vamps extend razor-sharp claws through the fingertips of their motorcycle gloves to slash the faces of the goons who get in their way. Fragments of the classic Mission: Impossible clone masks wash up on the beach like a Dalí painting in motion. The femme fatale diamond thief announces her victim’s death by promising that, “Humanity will be rid of your fetid odor.” Cattet & Forzani may have a style of their own entirely separate from Tarantino’s, but as a trio they share a common goal: reviving abandoned genre filmmaking traditions by turning up the volume on every reachable knob until the audience begs for mercy.

The biggest hurdle for getting into Cattet & Forzani’s work is learning to let go of linear narrative logic and just enjoy their surface pleasures for what they are: cool as fuck. Personally, that loose grip on plot worked best for me in the giallo-nostalgic free-for-all of The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, since they were working within a genre that’s always cared more about style than story. The Bond-era superspy picture is a little more rigid in its thriller plotting than the Italo murder mysteries they’ve previously pulled from, but they break away from that restriction by introducing a supervillain who tricks John Diman into believing he is starring in a film within the film, titled Mission Serpentik. That choice frees the movie up to hallucinate whatever hip spycraft imagery it pleases from moment to moment, including absurdly silly details like a disco-mirror paillettes dress that doubles as a wearable camera or a foosball table that doubles as an instrument of death (after its handles are likened to the throttle on a motorcycle). If there’s any one piece of filmmaking Reflection in a Dead Diamond‘s storytelling structure reminded me of, it’s John Cena’s “Firefly Fun House Match” with Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania 36, in which Cena wrestled for the purity of his own soul within the liminal psychic space of his subconscious, untethered from the wrestling ring. Once you accept that John Diman is mostly thwarting enemies within his own mind, Cattet & Bruno are free to take the imagery wherever they please, following whatever whims a post-modern Eurospy picture might inspire. Even twenty years ago, the Tarantino version of a James Bond spy thriller likely would’ve been more grounded to the confines of reality than that, but I have a feeling he would’ve been drawn to very similar high-style, high-artifice imagery. It’s exactly the movie a modern fan of its genre’s retro glory days would want to see come to bloody life.

-Brandon Ledet