Deep Red

Helga Ulman, a noted psychic attending a conference, collapses in shock and announces that someone in the audience is a murderer who will kill again. That night she is murdered. Hearing the screams from across the plaza, English-born jazz pianist Marc Daly (David Hemmings), who was talking with his drunken friend Carlo, rushes to Helga's apartment and notices a behatted figure in a leather trenchcoat (the gialli killer's attire of choice) crossing the plaza. The police arrive and question Marc, who is certain that he's missed something and embarks upon his own investigation with the aid of a female reporter (Daria Nicolodi).

Deep Red is a film that gains with repeated viewings. The first time you watch it you feel somewhat bewildered, not sure of how the pieces fit together. Watch it a second time and you realise it all fits without cheating: all you need is there, right in front of your eyes. Watch the film again and you come to appreciate the games the film-makers are playing, the phenomenological sleight of hand of the (too) precise camera set-ups, movements and general mise-en-scene.

Though Deep Red has its a few moments of mundeneity and banality – the police procedural scenes, in particular, are characteristically uninspired – one thing that it could not be accused of is a lack of ambition.

The writing is sharper than one might expect, with the post-murder encounter between Marc and Carlo, for instance, being laden with subtleties and nuances. Even if the discussions of class, gender and sexuality often fall flat, it's the fact that co-writers Dario Argento and Bernardo Zapponi even attempt to engage with such weighty subjects within the giallo framework that raises Deep Red head and shoulder over most other examples of the genre. "A man's reach should exceed his grasp," indeed.

And while the film employs the usual psychoanalytic motifs, like the primal scene, one has to laugh at the knowing juxtaposition of Marc's pop psychological explanation of why he became a pianist – a fantasy about smashing his father's teeth in – with a murder where the victim's head is repeatedly bashed against various surfaces, including the piano.

In terms of casting Deep Red benefits enormously from the intertextual baggage David Hemmings bring to the role of Marc via his association with Antonioni's classic Blow Up. Lower down the list the presence of Nicoletta Elmi as the strange little girl recalls the Venetian-set giallo Who Saw Her Die and, through the locale, Roeg's influential Don't Look Now. I must confess, however, to finding Daria Nicolodi's somewhat annoying in the early stages of the film, when she's trying to do comedy, though her dramatic work later on redeems things somewhat.

What do you see in Deep Red? I perceive reflections in a crimson eye and a remarkably accomplished piece of popular commercial film-making.