Deep Red (Profondo rosso) was Dario Argento’s transition film, the bridge between his earlier trilogy of giallo films (Italian murder mysteries)—The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971), and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)—and his later output of supernatural horror, beginning with his masterpiece Suspiria (1977). He had took a brief detour in making the historical drama Five Days in Milan (1973), a film whose commercial and critical failure propelled him back to the realm of gialli. As if reaffirming his commitment to the genre that made him, Argento’s Deep Red is one of his best films, prefiguring some of the elaborate stylistic devices that would come to consume his later work, yet still deeply embedded in a tight, absorbing narrative.

Although Deep Red is first and foremost a murder mystery, it is tinted with elements of horror and the supernatural. The film begins at a conference of paranormal psychologists, where a noted psychic, Helga Ulman (Macha Méril), senses that she is in the presence of a murderer who will kill again. She is right, of course,but the twist is that she is the next victim. Her murder (which Argento orchestrates, as with all the subsequent murders, in his own uniquely lurid, bloody fashion) is witnessed by Marcus Daly (David Hemmings, who played the lead in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup), an English jazz pianist living and teaching in Italy. He rushes up to Helga’s apartment, but by then it is too late; Helga is dead, and he catches a glimpse of someone in a brown raincoat leaving the building. The police cast a suspicious eye on Marcus, but it is obvious that he is not the culprit. However, he can’t shake his involvement in the case because something is gnawing at him: a missing painting. When he first entered Helga’s apartment, he saw a strange painting in the hallway. But, later, he swears that it is gone. “How can that be?” he asks his drunken friend, Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), who jokingly suggests that the painting is the key to the mystery (which, of course, it is).

The rest of the plot details Marcus’s slow, amateur-detective investigation into the case. Naturally, each new lead he turns up is murdered by the unseen killer (in true giallo style, we only see black-gloved hands and point-of-view shots) before he can reach them. He is aided by a strong-willed journalist (Daria Nicolodi), but the obsession is purely Marcus’s. He is a driven man, and the film’s final image of his face reflected in a vast pool of blood suggests that he may have succumbed to the madness he sought so desperately to unveil.

Like all of Argento’s films (even his failures), Deep Red is replete with astonishing and eerily hypnotic images, including a shadow-play knife murder that suddenly interrupts the opening credits and another scene where a gazing human eye suddenly appears out of the darkness of a closet. Human psychosis is the film’s bedrock (hence its often being compared to Hitchcock), and Argento visualizes the killer’s madness with roving extreme close-ups of creepy, discarded childhood objects spread across black velvet. There is also the suggestion of ghosts and haunted houses, and the plot incorporates sealed rooms hiding rotting corpses, a creepy nursery rhyme, and family murder, all of which is brought together into a tight, unified whole (with some suspension of disbelief required here and there). He almost drowns us in production design, moving from art deco interiors, to massive baroque villas and a recreation of the curved glass bar in Edward Hopper’s famous 1942 painting “Nighthawks” that looks wildly out of place at the edge of a massive piazza. Even at its most excessive, Deep Red is a film in which Argento is completely in command (some of his later films have the distinctly opposite feel, that the material has a life of its own and he has no control over it). He drops hints and clues, leads us down blind alleys with false leads, and throws in bits of musical and visual humor, toying with our emotions. One moment the film is light and funny, the next it is gory and sadistic. Yet, Argento never misses a beat.

While Suspiria arguably has Argento’s best opening scene, it would be hard to top Deep Red’s multiple climaxes. The solution to the mystery is a brilliant sleight of hand, and I would be surprised if it weren’t the inspiration for a similar ploy in the feature-length pilot episode of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990), in which a killer is revealed in similar fashion. Argento and his co-writer, Bernardino Zapponi (who frequently collaborated with Federico Fellini), are so slick with the narrative momentum and the manner in which the killer’s identity is unveiled that they can reveal in the end that we had already seen the killer during the initial murder scene. Argento and Zapponi take advantage of cinematic perception in a way that allows them to reveal their hand from the outset, but still win the game in the end.

Copyright © 2021 James Kendrick

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