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The opening titles play over a pastoral vista darkening at dusk, one final instance of stillness before the onslaught of kaleidoscopic disorientation. Blades and wrinkled dolls and bloodied pregnant bellies comprise the oneiric apparatus, just a typical nightmare for the London housewife (Edwige Fenech) in the wake of a miscarriage. "Leave psychoanalysis out of it," insists her beau (George Hilton), her sister (Nieves Navarro) accompanies her to the doctor for an offhand diagnosis, "your worst enemy is loneliness." The blonde next door (Marina Malfatti) has a provocative recommendation, a session with the sect of face-painting, puppy-sacrificing group-gropers in the castle. The satanic orgy's hangover lingers like an unwanted tattoo, a stalking brute (Ivan Rassimov) completes the terror. "Day after day, it's like I am falling into a pit." The distressed feminine mind splayed with wide-angle lenses and jabbing sitars, Sergio Martino visualizes the conundrum virtuosically. The traumatic accident is recalled as a barreling POV shot on negative stock, the reveal of a betrayal is glimpsed through beaded curtains that vanish via a shift in focus. Cobalt eyes on the pursuer to match dubious pills that dissolve in a liquid close-up, flickering reds that infiltrate the ominously empty apartment—signifiers of a slipping reality, but also jolts of Italianate hue to animate the foggy British winter. A proximity to Altman's Images is to be noted, "tanta paura..." The kindly elderly couple who receive the heroine in their inn are next seen as corpses posed in a grisly-parodic breakfast tableau, madness and foul play are sorted out on the rooftops. "Strange men have been following women since the Stone Age." Schlesinger in The Believers takes the American tour. With George Rigaud, Julián Ugarte, Luciano Pigozzi, Tom Felleghy, Renato Chiantoni, and Dominique Boschero.
--- Fernando F. Croce |