Blood Relatives
| Blood Relatives | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Claude Chabrol |
| Produced by |
Denis Héroux Eugène Lépicier |
| Written by | Sydney Banks Claude Chabrol Ed McBain (novel) |
| Starring |
Donald Sutherland Aude Landry Donald Pleasence Lisa Langlois David Hemmings Stephane Audran |
| Music by | Pierre Jansen |
| Cinematography | Jean Rabier |
| Edited by | Yves Langlois |
|
Production
company |
|
| Distributed by |
Filmcorp Productions Inc. (1981) (USA) Astral Video (1984) (Canada) CMV Laservision (2005) (Germany) United Artists Video (UAV) |
|
Release date
|
 1 February 1978 8 September 1978 16 February 1979 7 September 1979 October 1981 November 2005 (Turin Film Festival) |
|
Running time
|
100 mins. |
| Country | France/Canada |
Blood Relatives is a 1978 Canadian-French film directed by Claude Chabrol. Set in Montreal, it involves the brutal murder of a teenage girl and the subsequent investigation led by Donald Sutherland, reprising his low-key cop role from Klute.
One rainy night a teenage girl called Patricia staggers wounded into a police station saying that she and her older cousin Muriel, who lived in her family home, had been brutally attacked with a knife in a dark alley. The police find the mutilated body of the attractive Muriel. Patricia describes the assailant to them, but in an identity parade picks out a policeman.
Led by Inspector Carella, the investigation tries to find out who might have wanted to kill an apparently normal girl from an apparently normal family. A possible clue comes at the funeral, when Patricia's brother Andrew in grief throws himself on the coffin of his dead cousin. Patricia then tells Carella that it was Andrew who had murdered Muriel, his motive being that she had been sleeping with him but left him for her married boss, and had tried to kill Patricia as the only witness. The proof, she says, was in Muriel's diary.
When found by the police, the diary confirms Patricia's second story, insofar as Muriel did switch her affections from Andrew to her boss, but it also records a violent encounter between an evasive Muriel and an angry Andrew which formed the basis of Patricia's first story. After repeated lying, the girl admits that she was lethally jealous of the sexier Muriel, who she felt had stolen the love of her brother. After killing her horribly, she wounded herself to give credibility to her story.
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Wikipedia