The Irish director Ruairi Robinson once screened two of his shorts at a college film event which I helped run. One of the shorts had just been nominated for an Oscar; the other, which I think I preferred, if my alcohol-soaked memories are to be trusted, had been a solo passion project for Robinson. He'd worn so many different hats on the animated production that the scrolling end credits, which began by listing the cast and crew in the traditional manner, were gradually subsumed into a storm of 'Ruairi Robinsons', until the credits consisted of nothing more than the same name repeated over and over.

This was a joke; a self-aware filmmaker cleverly highlighting the level of control he'd had over the film we'd just seen, while simultaneously poking fun at his own ego. The credits of Sonno Profondo resemble those of Robinson's 'The House on Dame Street', but without the self-awareness.

One of my biggest bugbears when watching independent films (and you'll have to indulge me quite a lot on this before I go on to say more interesting stuff about the film) is credit-whoring. I wore a lot of hats on my giallo The Three Sisters, and am mentioned several times at both the beginning and end of the film, but have always conflated the main roles into a single 'written, shot, directed and edited by' accolade, which is situated at the top of the end credits. 

Look  at any 'proper' film-the director's credit tends to be at the end of the opening roll, but is occasionally the first of the end roll (c.f. Quentin Tarantino). You don't end the opening credits and open the end credits with the exact same citation. In fact, credits never get repeated; Pulp Fiction is, as stated at the beginning, a Quentin Tarantino film, but his directing and writing nods, which, as stated, kick-off the end credits, are technically a separate billing. Likewise, if the opening credits contain a list of the principal players, post-film we see not just their name, but the role they've played (if memory serves, Pulp Fiction may not actually follow this rule).

One thing that tends to distinguish amateur productions is the repetition of credits, often to pad out a short running time. Sonno Profondo is indeed an extremely short feature, running to just 66 minutes, so even the most egregious padding wouldn't take it up to 'normal' feature length. I can say this with confidence, as Luciano Onetti has indeed indulged in Robinson-esque levels of padding. I also got the impression that it wasn't actually intended as credit-padding, rather it was ego-padding, ego-stoking and ego-stroking. The brief interview contained on the US disc, which sees him speaking portentously about the film while wearing sunglasses indoors, backs up this assertion. The good news is that Onetti's film (I'm pretty sure it was directed by him anyway, I'd need to see a fourth directing credit to be certain) is pretty damn impressive.

It's definitely not for everyone. I actually had to watch it twice, on consecutive days, to get a handle on it; my concentration on first viewing being hampered by an itchy leg, tiredness, sickness and underestimating what would be required from me as a spectator. It was actually more watchable on second viewing, as I was approaching it as an active viewer, having realised, too late to salvage my initial screening, that it was more than the giallo trope-fetishisation  I had initially assumed it to be.

It does indeed indulge in image-fetishisation; the entire film is graded to resemble an old 1970s print that has seen better days. 90% of the film is comprised of POV shots too, so you'll certainly get your fill of leather gloves and straight razors. The POV camerawork may prove a turn off to many viewers, but I actually liked it a lot. Bear in mind, though, that one of the Youtube comments left for my first feature film suggested that the cameraman must have been drunk and high, so I may be slightly partial to wonky handheld images. On first viewing I did find myself pining after a while for a Herschell Gordon Lewis-style flat 2 shot of characters talking against a wall (there's also very little dialogue in the film), but, again, once I knew what I was getting myself in for, the second time it was all good. The decor, and props, are all extremely retro and stylish, and Onetti has certainly stretched the presumably-miniscule budget (unless he was lavishly paying himself for all the roles he performed in the production) impressively far. The fake blood, too, was brilliantly 70s; thick, gloopy and bright red. 

The style (or lack-thereof, as some would have it) does somewhat obscure the plot of the film, but, all the same, there is a definite plot here. It's one that isn't spoon-fed to the viewer, for although the film does end with a couple of fairly-standard revelations, they won't mean as much if the viewer hasn't been carefully cataloguing  the imagery, and occasional aural clues, of the ten or so distinct sequences which comprise the rest of the film. Onetti, in his sunglassesed interview, specifically states that the film was designed to be more accessible on a second viewing, and this did prove true for me. 

Not everyone will respond to the fractured manner in which plot information is relayed, particularly when it comes on top of such a heightened visual style. In my recent piece on Blood and Black Lace, I commented that old-fashioned mysteries often offered up clues to the attentive viewer, whereas gialli offered nothing but red herrings. Sonno Profondo, which has the barest minimum of characters, can't really offer anything in the way of red herrings, but the presentation of the pieces which form the whole of the puzzle is such that it requires active participation from the viewer. In short, the viewer becomes the 'detective' who sifts through the fragments of clues and plot, and the satisfaction derived from the final revelations will be predicated on just how attentive the viewer has been, and how sharp their detective skills are. I don't want to overstate the complexity of the plot, which is actually fairly simple when it's all unfurled (and not unrelated to the two Argento films from which the film takes its title), but there's a satisfaction to be gleaned from figuring everything out which is greater than that offered by a standard gialli, with explanation-exposition which sets everything out in an A-B-C manner.

One final note on the film's shooting style-once the final pieces of the plot puzzle have been slotted into place, one could argue that the disorienting POV shots, and the dream-like atmosphere, are entirely narratively justified. Oh, and the music's pretty damn great too, as with most neo-gialli.

This will be a short review of a short film that should have been shorter. 

Neo-giallo is a catch-all term that tends to be affixed to any vaguely giallo-inspired film made post 2000, but, for me, it's also synonymous with a series of films which produce facsimiles of the style of the traditional giallo, with none of the substance. In some cases (Forzani and Cattet), the filmmakers refine the style to such an extent that the films cannot be consumed as traditional movies, and can only to instead be considered as (attempted) works of art. Which is to say, they're not at all enjoyable. Yellow, with its precise imagery and pounding soundtrack, veers dangerously close to this arty territory, but with its semblance of a plot and reasonably-traditional editing, it falls just short. As a short, it falls a long way short.

The aforementioned precise imagery occasionally veers into giallo territory, with an early eyeball slashing, and some scissor fetishising, but for the most part the film seems to be imitating late 80s and early 90s Michael Mann. And it succeeds admirably, and is indeed very pleasing to the eye. However, if I want to see some sexy shots of a car driving around a neon-bathed city I can get my fill from a 30 second commercial, without the need to spend 26 minutes watching something like this.

The semblance of a plot concerns a Lucio Fulci-lookalike, who gets a whispered phone call from a killer who, a terribly performed and written radio exchange informs us, has killed three women in a matter of months. Old Fulci becomes obsessed with tracking down the killer, occasionally taking time out to pose for carefully-composed shots in which he peers at his reflection in a mirror. If a character in a thriller looks at their own reflection, you can be fairly certain that it's either a clever-clogs director thinking that he's subtly paving the way for a last minute twist about a split personality, or it's a set-up for a jump scare with some sort of sudden activity being captured in the reflection. 

This plot, which is stretched so thin that it's invisible to the naked eye (and probably invisible to all of the naked actress who embodies all the female roles) for most of the  running time, leads into a  shocking last minute twist, which becomes eminently guessable once no-one jumps into frame behind Lucio when he's staring at himself in the mirror. Given that Lucio is literally the only character in the film, apart fromt he women being offed by the masked killer, the only real twist is that there's a twist at all; that the filmmakers thought anyone would be even mildly surprised by a rehash of the same rug-pull that we've seen in Haute Tension, Fight Club, Identity and so many other films over the last 20 years.

Much like the film, I've gone on too long here. This film has no real mystery element, and is devoid of the wacky personality that distinguishes the best gialli. Which is to say, it's a great example of a neo-giallo. It does look very nice, particularly the scene in the underground room with orange pillars. The soundtrack is brilliant, too. The film is not.

Blood and Black Lace is often spoken of as the film that consolidated  the giallo as a distinct cinematic entity.  I'd tend to be of the same opinion as Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet, who suggest, in their interview on Arrow's Blu-ray release of the film, that Bava's previous works The Telephone and The Girl Who Knew Too Much, along with the German Krimi thrillers, defined the form of the giallo, while Blood and Black Lace paved the way in terms of content. And it wasn't until Dario Argento began unleashing his masterpieces on the world five years down the line that form and content coalesced into a nice, big, gialloey whole.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much, in particular, has much in common with the giallo films which briefly proliferated the international market in the wake of Argento's international breakthrough, detailing as it does the amateur investigation of a foreigner into the work of a crazed killer. Overall, though, it's a light and jaunty film, and the suspense sequences tend to end in punchlines rather than murders. In Blood and Black Lace, Bava seems to have realised that gore and murder doesn't preclude an air of tongue-in-cheek fun, even when pushed to the forefront of the film. Here, the suspense sequences dominate, sharing the running time with by-the-numbers police procedural sequences.

These procedural sequences impose the structure of a plot on the film, but it's an extremely perfunctory one. The audience is denied the conventional identification figure, who screenwriting gurus and studio execs alike often claim is vital to the success of a film. Here, the audience is encouraged to identify with the director, or at least identify him as an extremely stylish and assured presence, and allow him to guide you through the  8 greatest shocks ever filmed, as the above poster would have it (the 8th shock is presumably the realisation at the end of the film that only 7 characters have died).

The murder sequences are masterworks all; a heady mix of brilliantly controlled camerawork, daringly expressionistic lighting, and just enough of a sense of fun to make the many and varied horrors visited upon the cast of women digestible (I do say that as a male man; and that's to say nothing of the refusal of any character to even countenance the possibility that a woman can be anything but a victim, as shown by the rounding up of all suspects, AKA every male connected with the fashion house).  They have a different feel to much of Argento's set pieces, with the lighting and camera movement to the fore, whereas Argento, in his gialli at least, tended to favour editing and music (albeit with some notable instances of camera flourishes). A couple of tracking shots, one across a large room towards a body lying behind a screen, and another which eases mannequins aside as the camera hones in on the final murder victim, almost have the weight of the point-of-view shots which proliferated in the slasher films, with the camera becoming an active agent in the mayhem.

The form the film takes, with the procedural scenes linking a series of murder set-pieces, with no one character at the centre of things, suggests a refinement of the genre which is almost redolent of the neo-giallo films, which tend to eschew the murder-mystery aspect of the classic examples of the genre. Nonetheless, there is a murder-mystery at the heart of this film, and by dispensing with the audience identifier, or cipher, one could argue that Bava tasks the audience themselves with discerning the killer's identity. After all, when it comes down to it, the viewers of murder-mysteries tend to actively engage with the film by guessing at the killer's identity themselves, and don't just sit back and let the characters figure things out. By clearing the cipher character out of the way, Bava leaves more room, and time, for his playful but deadly murder scenes.

The ultimate revelation as to the killer's' identityies gives rise to a very interesting question regarding just how active audiences want to be when watching films. Older, more traditional murder mysteries in the Agatha Christie-vein often offered up a series of clues, which an alert viewer could piece together to uncover the killer's identity (although the best examples would tend to include some misdirection, so that the clues only come to the fore in retrospect). The giallo tended to take a different approach, by presenting clues which are deliberately designed to confuse and obfuscate, with the killer's unmasking being a shocking twist. Of course, once you've watched several of them, you can take all the red herrings the films present as clues, in that the one character who isn't offered up as a potential suspect is the killer-by-default. Blood and Black Lace for the most part follows (or creates) this giallo template, for one of the killers at least, and a seasoned fan of the genre may be able to distil an important clue from some casually introduced character backstory towards the film's beginning, but the reveal is essentially designed to be unguessable. It is guessable, of course, in that there are a finite number of suspects and motives, and plenty of people have probably got it right over the years, but they probably only have the law of averages to thank for that.

On the flip side, the film gains a whole new dimension on a second watch when one knows the ultimate solution, far more so than most gialli. Bava and his actors seem to have really put a lot of thought into small moments; facial expressions, lines of dialogue etc which seem unremarkable initially become, when viewed armed with a knowledge of what is actually going on, a window into the devious minds at work. One such example comes early on, when a character's facial expression changes as they enter a room. A first time viewer would likely think nothing of this, but if one considers the facts as they ultimately are, and who turns out to be in the room, we can see the expression change, and the entire conversation which follows, as evidence of a scheming mind hard at work.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that money is the prime motivation behind the murders, as it was for most of the 60s gialli, These films form an interesting bunch, as they don't quite conform to a template in the way that the post-Argento films do. Many of them are situated on the furthest reaches of the genre, if they fall within its boundaries at all. There were a series of films which did follow a basic trend, though, (The Sweet Body of Deborah, Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion, So Sweet... So Perverse). Ernesto Gastaldi and Umberto Lenzi, who were at the forefront of these early gialli, seemed to take the last twenty minutes of Blood and Black Lace as the basis for a series of films based around inheritances and deception. The aim was usually to drive a rich person to  madness, to get at their money. Argento, in his genre-defining films, took Bava's ostentatious set pieces, pushed money to one side, and let the madness  take control.