Lucio Fulci was one of those who was not used to taking a break from work, putting a picture every year, but severe hepatitis forced him to briefly interrupt the outstanding race. At the onset of the recovery period, the director quickly returned to the lineup, deciding to transfer to the screen a story that absorbs several genres, with which the master always got along, not afraid to try new things. If you are subject to comedy and horror, then your talent does not tolerate doubts - dare, creator! However, Fulci did not act at random, having already had time to probe the ground, having certain developments, which can be seen in a similar tape “La gabbia” (“La gabbia”), when the attending author worked on a script for someone else’s project with the same plot parallels about a captured man near a woman and the burning passion between them. He was inspired by the idea of shooting another story about a woman whom he loved so much, giving them a significant role in his work. He was wrongly accused of misogyny, because Fulci was strict with incompetence, rightly despite the gender, and treated all smart actresses with care as if they were daughters.
Perhaps, it is the genre affiliation exclusively to eroticism that is too superficial in considering the picture, because the director perfectly understood no worse than all of us, about the huge competition among colleagues and the general primitiveness of such a monosyllabic direction intended by the visual excitator of the public. In his production, Fulci frankly gravitated to the study of the mysterious female nature, which is like a water element, not accidentally constantly appearing in the frame, consists of an amazing combination of flexible malleability, charming tenderness, creative beginning and at the same time - recalcitrant power, rushing between love and hatred. Exuberant waves can affectionately take in, like a warm embrace, but also knock off their feet, dragging the sea to the bottom, absorbing forever in themselves, dissolving in the bottomless abyss. But from crazy love or from loneliness? Keeping in mind this changeable symbolism in thousands of forms without the right to solve even by poets and artists, the author builds a plot that flows smoothly from it about a girl who is demonstratively natural in her pristine female beauty, plunged into the pool of tragic passions. To heartache, adoring her beloved, ready to give all herself, hoping for tenderness in return, she is in captivity of strong feelings, which she cannot change in the semitone of manifestations, in order to suffer and love equally completely to the very end. And when this woman-element loses her object of obsession, torturing her and making her happy, she overflows, becoming an unbridled force of nature, destroying instead of the original gift to create.
This allegory is closely intertwined with a quite beautiful erotic thriller, playing on a visually attractive combination of Eros and Thanatos, showing a number of piquant memorable scenes about the fateful passion between an Epicurean musician who excites his inspiration and loves sadistic games on feelings, and a free slave who goes mad at his tragic loss. The chronological order of presentation is deliberately disrupted, creating the effect of psychological rehabilitation of the heroine after grief, who undergoes shock therapy of memories. They are very different, that sadden and inspire, to once piece together a broken mirror, groping all the wounding fragments, remembering them, in order to see the whole picture with the realization that the crooked mirror distorting the truth. Truth is a treasured medicine. And again, the second important character of the surgeon captured by the vengeful fury, who has long fallen into an invisible collar from the loss of her pristine masculine nature, lost in false habits to the once great calling to save people, which has become a bland routine, and to the phantom of his wife, who should be released so that he can regain his former life. The fatal symbiosis of death and passion of the hostess with the prisoner resembles a common session of painful healing at the expense of complementing each other, so that she again found solace in her turbulent waters, and he revived the beast (a sober dog in the frame and his death-rebirth becomes another metaphor) inside herself, resurrecting the subsided male instincts.
The film for many turned out to be a true diabolical honey because of its controversy, because not all viewers wanted from the director such a genre combination, when some were waiting for the usual thoroughbred thriller or horror, and others wanted simply romantic eroticism without any psychoanalysis with tear and tragedy. But this is not fair on our part to Lucio Fulci, who turned out to be true to himself, remaining creatively brave as he once was, leaving a successful comedy field, going into horrors, occupying a significant niche there. He conducted a trial of the genre, shooting a psychological thriller with a significant share of exciting scenes with a signature Italian taste, understanding the sense in demonstrating the natural beauty and plasticity of the female body, beneficially going against the glossy Americanized silicone standard, imbuing the story with a truly pleasant melody on a saxophone, and also appearing in the episode as a smiling salesman of bracelets for lovers, like a modern Cupid holding a shop.
6 out of 10