Claude Chabrol’s L’oeil du malin (US: The Third Lover) perfectly represents the transition from film noir to the French New Wave. The suspense is psychological, the crime is domesticated, and the motivations are inexplicable, taking on a kind of emotional nihilism. Unlike so much of noir, the plot is almost painfully simple: a lonely stranger becomes jealous of a beautiful, happy couple (“I merely slipped on the surface of their happiness”) and seeks to destroy them. His strategy, however, is to become as intimate as possible with them (physically, emotionally) in order to destroy them from the inside out, which gives the film a quiet tension that only gradually is revealed to spring from psychosis. Writer Albin Mercier (Jacques Charrier) arrives in a small German town and becomes quickly fascinated by his wealthy neighbors, Andreas (Walther Reyer) and Hélène Hartman (Stéphane Audran), and their happy home surrounded by stone walls and gates. He makes it his mission to penetrate their household and establish immediate intimacy through manipulation disguised as friendship. (Here’s where comparisons to René Clément’s Purple Noon released two years earlier are unavoidable.) When Andreas takes a business trip, Mercier begins following Hélène secretly and incessantly, and the more he learns, the more his obsession turns to rage. To convey a schizoid mind, Chabrol brilliantly contrasts Mercier’s interior voice-over with his simultaneous behavior on screen: “I arrived in a dreadful mood,” he says as he walks into a gathering with a warm smile. Brilliant scenes and compositions abound, but Hélène’s foreground preparation for a game of chess as the two men blow smoke behind her is a masterpiece in itself.