Most Blood-Curdling Movie Ever Made

It's awards season again. There's no category for this in the Oscars or Golden Globes, but I think I'm qualified to determine what is the most spine-chilling movie ever made: I've seen thousands of movies from every continent, and I once had a long relationship with a Frenchman, greatly increasing my understanding of refined emotional torture. So here's my Munch-inspired statuette, which can only go to this: La Tourneuse de pages, by Denis Dercourt. It came on today while my husband and I were eating lunch. We watched, mesmerized with horror, until the end--at which point a woman's sanity, family and career had been quietly but purposely destroyed by this polite, well bred and outwardly obedient teenage girl:
American horror movies with their slashers and screaming co-eds have nothing on La Tourneuse de pages. In American horror movies, everyone knows that the villain trying to kill them is a villain trying to kill them--the only suspense is when and how, and in what order he'll go through his victims. Yawn.

But in La Tourneuse de pages, the woman whose life is destroyed doesn't know (and will never know) what hit her. She thinks that she went insane. She thinks that she became obsessed with the teenage girl she hired as a live-in babysitter over the school holidays, scared the girl away by telling her she loved her, and destroyed her own marriage and career over that impossible, irrational love. Nope. Everything that happened was purposely engineered by the girl, as vengeance for something the woman did to her when she was a child--an event the woman doesn't even remember; when they meet again, the woman doesn't recognize her and the girl doesn't refresh her memory. She simply destroys her entire life, so subtly and with such restraint that no one involved would ever be able to pin the blame on her; then she leaves.

No American could ever make this movie--not even George Cukor, who made Gaslight. It could only be French, or maybe Japanese. (I also dated a Japanese guy when I was in high school, so trust me on this.) Want emotional sadism at its most nerve-shatteringly subtle and restrained? Want revenge so exquisitely awful that the victim and everyone they care about thinks they did it to themselves? Then what you want is French or Japanese.