The Unfaithful Wife (French: La Femme infidèle) is a 1969 French–Italian crime drama film written and directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Stéphane Audran and Michel Bouquet.

Although commercially unsuccessful in France with only 682,295 admissions,[2] The Unfaithful Wife was quickly picked up by US distributor Allied Artists and premiered in New York on 9 November 1969.

[3] Roger Greenspun of The New York Times called it a "calmly and thoughtfully perverse" film born from a "unique cinematic imagination",[4] and Vincent Canby included it in his "Ten Best" list.

Paul Taylor of Time Out magazine titled it "one of Chabrol's mid-period masterpieces, a brilliantly ambivalent scrutiny of bourgeois marriage and murder.

"[5] Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian that "Chabrol displays an irrestistible logic and an ironic humour", and "what could have been just another thriller becomes... also a passionate love story, with its share of intense irony and a pervading sense of the quirkiness of fate.

"[6] TV Guide called it "arguably the best of Chabrol's superb, Hitchcockian studies of guilt, love, and murder among the French elite", adding that "Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran […] give perhaps the finest performances of their careers.