ON THE eve of her 35th birthday, Claire Doste (Michèle Laroque) dons a lowcut dress and invites over the three men she's been seeing in the hopes that it will become evident which one to opt for. When the three contenders proffer engagement rings over dinner, Claire sizes them up, and reflects, "But you're all so... similar." Similar her prospective fiancés may be, but a cruel and unusual fate befalls each one as the macabre evening wears on. Accidents waiting to happen, they're polished off, suitor by suitor, in a series of grotesque mishaps with domestic appliances. Meanwhile, investigating a theft in the building, the police intermittently call by, only to find the damsel in increasing distress frantically trying to put her house of horrors into order.

"Serial Lover"'s sensibility is one of stylised, tongue-in-cheek exaggeration. But it's all of a piece - the romantic-novel chapter headings that punctuate the grisly action, the phantasmagoric graphics, the terribly black humour, the lurid colours of Claire's ultra-contemporary retro-chic Parisian flat. "It's modern here," says a guest when a shot of blood is dispensed with the freezer-generated ice cubes. Music-driven and advertisement-slick, this is a knowingly flirtatious movie, out to impress with its playthings - the CD jukebox, a fireplaceless fire - and such flash techniques as manic cuts, extreme close-ups and comic, dynamic camerawork. And in a neat reversal of the title of Marcel Duchamp's painting 'The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even', this time it's the suitors who are dispatched, with cartoonesque reality. "Serial Lover" is a silly film, blithe and burlesque, morbid but mordantly funny.