The two high schoolers plan and commit a vicious murder, but when they attempt to get away with it, they encounter something more horrible than even their morbid imaginations could conjure up. Alice sets the wheels spinning, roping her timid and sexually impotent boyfriend, Luc into her plot to kill a classmate, the suave, swaggering boxer Said, who asks Alice point blank whether she wants to fuck him or not. She seems flattered, not disgusted, with this approach, but plans Said's death immediately afterwards. After the murder, the couple staggers about, gasping in bloody horror and ecstasy. In classic Hitchcockian form, Ozon subverts our expectations.
Nothing is hidden from view.
The death takes place in a space framed by the shower entrance through which the viewer watches the murder, as Luke had watched the shower seduction from the other room. Therefore, the horror and fascination of watching such an event is magnified by the feeling that one is standing in the next room. Like Fassbinder, Ozon uses this hidden, voyeuristic gaze, to provide the sensation of terrible, petrified, yet thrilling immediacy felt in slasher films. That pleasure quickly turns to anarchy and terror after the conspirators drive out to the woods to dispose of the body. Romantic conceptions of tranquil nature, and fairy tale images of a wild and supernatural forest, both shape Alice and Luc's journey into the woods.