Rich ex-model Mme Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset) engages Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) as live-in maid for the rural Brittany home she shares with her husband and their two children. Sophie is odd but her work exemplary and she fits comfortably in with household. Before long though, and much to the family’s dismay, she begins to forge a rapport with Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), the skittish local postmistress with a reputation for opening mail.

Gradually dark stories emerge implicating both women in the violent deaths of members of their respective families, and Sophie’s carefully disguised illiteracy leads her further and further into trouble. Things can only end in tragedy.

Darling of English crime writing Ruth Rendell is not the most obvious of targets for a French New Wave veteran like Chabrol, but in co-adapting (with Caroline Eliacheff) early novel A Judgement In Stone he has made his best film in a while. Like his most celebrated thriller, 1968’s Le Boucher, it’s a complex slow-burner built not so much on event as character. His casting is immaculate.

Bonnaire is mousy and taciturn, smiles rarely and walks with a deliberate, shuffling gait. From the outset she is a closed-book, able to turn-up at the station with her entire life packed inside a single suitcase. When she’s not working she sits and stares at the TV in her room.

Huppert, who won the 1996 Best Actress Cesar, is brash, almost tomboyish in comparison. Hair in pigtales, she skips through much of the picture with the air on an excitable child, insulting those who dare venture into her Post Office, abusive when she collects old clothes for the local church. Jeanne is ticklish and capricious, a dangerous and unpredictable catalyst to the reticent maid.

It is clear, however, where their director’s sympathies lie. Bisset is terrific as the snobbish employer, supposedly sympathetic but incapable of seeing hired help as anything but inferior. Virginie Ledoyen is particularly good as the grown-up daughter clearly cut from the same cloth. To them the new maid is initially problematic, later someone to be ignored when it suits, like a well-trained dog. Bisset’s dignified tantrum when Sophie takes off on the day of Melinda’s birthday bash is a volcano of class resentment.

The women watch trashy TV, giggle in corners like schoolgirls, even get a ticking off from the pompous local priest. The Lelievres on the other hand are refined and bombastic in their privilege. They settle down to opera on their television, at the end even dressing for the occasion. They are, Chabrol is saying, asking for it.

The end is significant for its restraint. Events are executed with cold, deliberate detachment. The final resolution, even as the credits roll, completes a circle but seems almost redundant, a second punchline.

Coldly shot and simply scored, La Ceremonie is less melodramatic, less heated and even better than Chabrol’s last, 1994’s delirious psycho-horror L’Enfer. After a decade in which much of his output never even reached this country, this film goes a long a way to restoring his reputation as Hitchcock’s rightful heir.