Futures aren’t meant to be told. In Roberto Gavaldón’s En la palma de tu mano (US: In the Palm of Your Hand), the suave, handsome Arturo de Córdova stars as Professor Jaime Karin, a scam artist who charms “hysterical” women by telling their fortunes based on beauty salon revelations fed to him by his hairdresser wife Clara (Carmen Montejo). When a local millionaire dies suddenly, Karin plots to acquire part of the fortune inherited by the man’s gorgeous, young widow Ada Cisneros de Romano (Leticia Palma) whom he approaches at the funeral (a lovely dolly shot) to begin a deception that results in her confession of mariticide. With each revelation, Karin and Ada form a bond over money and murder that leads to a perverse form of romance and a fast track to poetic justice and spiritual despair. While Alex Phillips’s cinematography eschews chiaroscuro aside from a shadowy gunfight in a mountain cabin, the star of the film is Francisco Marco Chillet’s production design: astounding sets include a heaven-like hotel lobby, a bustling Mexican streetscape, a cavernous all-white morgue, and Karin’s enormous, starry-rococo fortune telling studio which hints at inspiration from German expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920). Despite a few logic problems in the script and melodramatic flourishes, Gavaldón’s confident direction produces compelling sequences one after another, like the suspense of a police officer’s roadside assistance for a driver transporting a corpse or the symbolism of a roaring fire winding down to embers to convey sexual satisfaction.