The Pyx

• The Pyx is based on the 1959 novel by Montreal author John Buell, but the screenplay was written by Robert Schlitt, not Buell himself.
• Christopher Plummer stars as Sgt. Jim Henderson; the dead woman he's investigating is Elizabeth Lucy, played by Karen Black.
• The film was shot on location in Montreal, leaning on the city's Catholic architecture and iconography for its Black Mass-tinged plot.
• At roughly $1 million, The Pyx was, at the time of its release, the most expensive movie ever produced in Canada, backed by the Canadian Film Development Corporation and the Royal Bank of Canada.
• It was also released under the alternate titles 'The Hooker Cult Murders' and 'La Lunule.'

Elizabeth's death may not be murder at all but ritual sacrifice completed by her own hand—a willing participant whose faith demanded she descend into prostitution and despair as a perverse Stations of the Cross, making her both victim and priestess.

Detective Henderson's investigation reads as a mirror of the Catholic confession: every person he interviews is a sinner bearing witness, and his descent through Montreal's underworld parallels a spiritual unraveling that suggests the cult has already marked him as the next offering.

The film's split structure—Henderson's present-tense detective work intercut with Elizabeth's past—functions as a literal judgment narrative: the dead woman is being tried by the living, and the pyx around her neck is evidence not of her corruption but of the city's.

A prostitute plunges from a Montreal high-rise, and Detective Jim Henderson catches the case. Dead hookers don't usually warrant much paperwork, but something about this one sticks. Elizabeth Lucy wore a pyx around her neck—a small container for the consecrated host, Catholic ritual object, not standard streetwear. As Henderson retraces her final weeks through flashback, the investigation spirals into an occult-tinged nightmare involving a Satanic cult operating behind respectable Montreal society. The dead woman's faith becomes the only thread connecting her death to something ancient, patient, and wearing human skin.