Insular worlds with coded languages and deadly stakes are a recurrence in Melville’s work, but that sort of milieu takes on an altogether different form in Les enfants terribles, the director’s sophomore effort. An unlikely collaboration with Jean Cocteau, the film spins a hallucinatory yarn about teenage siblings Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Edouard Dermithe) and their self-imposed isolation from the outside world, which involves cryptic cat-and-mouse games that they play on each other and eventually the friends who fall into their alluring orbit. Swerving wildly between master/servant and nurse/patient dynamics—and always with a barely veiled incestuous undertone—Elisabeth and Paul spend much of the film barking Cocteau’s feverish dialogue back and forth at one another as they while away the time in a house occupied only by them and their ailing mother. It’s the talkiest film in Melville’s oeuvre by a long shot, but the third-act shift to a cavernous mansion where the siblings conduct their most dangerous flights of fantasy with a pair of friends finds the director inserting his own visual flourishes, honoring both the surrealism and the Brechtian theatricality of the material in equal measure.