The Insatiables

Deep Red was Dario Argento’s first full-fledged masterpiece, a riveting thriller whose secrets carefully unravel via a series of carefully calibrated compositions that become not unlike virtual gateways into Freudian pasts. Like Argento’s ever-flowing camera, Deep Red’s killer is everywhere—the protagonist’s claustrophobia becomes a physical response both to the film’s oppressive mise-en-scène and Argento’s formal framing. Unlike The Cat O’ Nine Tails, there’s no silly scientific rationale here for the film’s murders (indeed, there are no easy answers). Argento delicately grapples with issues feminism and masculinity within Deep Red’s meticulously visual exegesis of a troubled psyche. If the truth in Antonioni’s Blowup was inscribed in a photograph of a potential crime scene, truth inDeep Red is stamped in the memory of pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings, also the star of the Antonioni classic). The film’s murders are gorgeous to the point of distraction. This is Argento’s intent though—to scare and awe the spectator so that he or she won’t see the obvious. The film’s final piece de resistance evokes the elusiveness of memory but, more importantly, shows that the identity of the film’s killer was always available to the careful spectator.

via Slant