Veering from black comedy to stylized espionage thriller, Clouzot's gleefully unclassifiable Cold War drama is a fascinating study of paranoia revolving around a decrepit sanitarium whose incompetent head doctor unravels a dangerous conspiracy when he agrees to secretly house a fugitive atomic scientist. Clouzot perfectly captures the quintessence of the Kafkaesque by fusing exacting realist detail with a playfully nonsensical logic in order to suggest the real and the absurd as two sides of the same strange coin. Reaching for a broader audience beyond France, Clouzot ambitiously assembled an international marquee cast led by Peter Ustinov and Sam Jaffe to bring a cosmopolitan flair to this, one of his biggest box office disappointments and most unfairly maligned film.