This hyperstylised horror thriller plays like a feature-length advert for a perfume that would smell like tuberose, leather and rotting meat, with top notes of fake blood and old cheese.

The barely there plot concerns a man Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange) who returns home from a business trip to find his wife has disappeared. She may have been murdered by someone or something within the gorgeous art nouveau apartment building in which they live. But it's almost impossible to tell what's going on, given the film is nearly all dream sequence, claggy with narrative digressions, flashbacks and freaky visuals, often of vagina-shaped head wounds, extreme close-ups of eyes, and a nipple being scraped with a knife that directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani like so much they show it six times. A homage to Italian giallo films of the 1970s (see Dario Argento, Mario Bava) was clearly intended, but at least those movies were entertaining, whereas this is just vacuous, pretentious and nasty.