Directed and written by Alain Jessua, The Killing Game is a story about fantasy, the world of comic books, intersecting with our boring reality. Pierre (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and his wife Jacqueline (Claudine Auger) are collaborators on a series of popular comic books — they are drawn by a team of artists led by Guy Peellaert, who painted the cover for Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and whose painting, Frank Sinatra, which featured the headline “Frankie Goes Hollywood” which inspired the band’s name — and have been hired by a wealthy patron named Bob Neuman (Michel Duchaussoy). He wants them to transform him into a Diabolik type gentleman thief, which is quite different from his real life, where he’s controlled by his mother Genevieve (Eleonare Hirt).

Yet when we first meet Pierra and Jacqueline, they’re destitute, unable to make their bills and superfan Bob comes along at the right time, giving them an escape from the poorhouse. Bob is able to tell some wild stories about his life, yet he seems like a manchild who has barely left the house. He flies the couple to his Swiss estate and they go about recreating him in comic book form as The Killer of Neuchatel.

Auger is best known for playing Domino in Thunderball, but in my head, she’s a giallo queen of sorts, appearing in Bava’s nascent slasher A Bay of Blood and in one of the meanest of the yellow films, Black Belly of the Tarantula. Jacqueline is a woman trapped in her marriage, her writer husband believing he has control of her, whether its through his concepts and words or by just being a traditional male role as the husband. Yet her artwork is what makes his ideas so appealing and she’s a gorgeous and intelligent woman who begins to expand her agency through flirtation with Bob, despite how potentially dangerous he is.

I loved the look and feel of this movie, arriving as a Euroart film with hints of the aforementioned giallo and some Eurospy as well. While it didn’t intend to, it reminds me of the constant battle of who created things when it comes to the Marvel method, where Stan Lee has claimed creation of everything while artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were given at the most a sentence to go by and returned with fully formed stories and pictures that Lee would put the words to. It’s difficult to say who was the voice of making the damn thing, though my visual side has always been with the artists.

This hasn’t been released in the U.S., surprisingly, and is a great find for cinephiles.