Knife and Heart (French title Un couteau dans le cœur) is a 2018 French film.
The story is a Giallo pastiche. In the summer of 1979, gay porn producer Anne (Vanessa Paradis) sets out to make an ambitious film, only for her actors to be killed off one by one by a mysterious masked assailant.
Tropes
- The Alcoholic: Anne, which is the reason her ex-girlfriend left her.
- Animal Motifs: The killer is followed by a blind grackle.
- Anti-Hero: Anne is a sad, messed up case of this.
- Cast Full of Gay: Everyone is either bi or gay; Anne is bi, and she's surrounded by gay men as a result of working in gay porn.
- Eunuchs Are Evil: The killer was castrated by his homophobic father, which caused him to rape/murder gay men with his knife penis. Literally.
- Everyone Is Bi: Anne is bi, and essentially everybody who isn't gay will be bi.
- Gay Cruising: The killer occasionally cruises for his victims, and kills his second on-screen victim after cruising on him and pretending he wants to hook up in a public street.
- Giallo: The film itself, while the porn film Homocidal is a parody of the genre.
- Lack of Empathy: Anne shocks her cast and crew with her callousness about all the murders- until an actual friend of hers gets killed.
- Phallic Weapon: The killer literally has a knife for his penis.
- Porn with Plot: Anne is making one of these, based on her own police interrogation.
- Psychosexual Horror: Both the movie itself and the porn movie Anne is making.
- Rape as Drama: Anne attempts to force her ex-girlfriend to love her. It doesn't go well.
- Yandere: Anne to her ex-girlfriend Lois, who also happens to be her film editor.
