Sightlines · reception

How The Butcher was received

1970 · Claude Chabrol · The Butcher on Sightlines

The arc

Praised on release as the peak of Chabrol's late-'60s hot streak, it has only climbed since — now routinely called his masterpiece and a fixture on best-French-thriller lists, exhibit A in the case that Chabrol was the most underrated of the New Wave.

What’s debated

The perennial fight is over the ending — quietly devastating or frustratingly opaque? — folded into the bigger cinephile argument about whether Chabrol deserves a seat beside Godard and Truffaut.

Its footprint

This is the film that gets tagged 'the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made' — the shorthand critics reach for whenever Chabrol's Hitchcock obsession comes up, fitting for the man who co-wrote the first book-length study of Hitchcock.

Where it stands

The standard gateway drug to Chabrol — the one title from his fifty-plus films that shows up on 'essential French cinema' lists and Letterboxd four-star reviews alike.

Did you know? Chabrol shot it in the real village of Trémolat in the Dordogne, with locals filling out the town — and its star, Stéphane Audran, was his wife at the time, mid-run in the celebrated cycle of films they made together around 1970.