The Flower of Evil

Claude Chabrol's 2003 French psychological thriller La Fleur du mal, released in English as The Flower of Evil, follows three generations of the wealthy Charpin-Vasseur family of Bordeaux. Aunt Line was once tried and acquitted for killing her father, a Nazi sympathizer. Her niece Anne is now campaigning for mayor, while her grown daughter and her second husband Gérard's grown son — step-siblings raised in the same household — have fallen in love with each other.

In the middle of the election, an anonymous pamphlet begins circulating that revives the family's old murder scandal and its wartime Nazi ties, throwing the household into turmoil. No one knows who wrote it: the rival party, or someone dangerously close to Anne? The film competed for the Golden Bear at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival and was later nominated for a Goya Award as best European film. True to Chabrol's signature style, it probes betrayal, incest and buried guilt beneath the polished surface of bourgeois respectability.