J. B. Priestley in one of his plays warned that playing the truth resembles speeding on a dangerous turn. The English playwright friends only quarreled, deciding to be frank until they felt nauseous from each other, and Robert Ossein, putting his next film as a director, went even further, using a roughly similar story about a company of friends who gathered together for an evening dinner, which turned into a real crime. Friends who are brought together by bad secrets, envy and hostility among themselves, successfully spend the evening in a cozy house with bad weather outside the window. Soon, a common friend appears on the doorstep, whose eccentric antics and wealth help the others briefly rally together in a shared hatred of him. Not in vain flatter, comparing with the Devil, because the entertainment offered by him will awaken the ugly and insidious demons in each, whom they hid behind elegant costumes and luxurious dresses, masking themselves with sweet compliments. Entertainment in the truth allows you to pour out bile, arrogantly parrying the sharp pricks of friends to attack the tricky questions of your neighbor, raising the degree of the undertaking, in order to enjoy the baseness of others without embarrassment, compensating for your own dark side. In the end, people are not strangers, firmly tied together, no one will descend to scandal, no matter how low they all fall, and disturbed demons will not calm down, tasted the excitement of mental nudism.
All this could remain within the framework of a thriller with impeccable psychology, but Ossein aggravates the situation, introducing the classics of the detective genre with an insidious murder, a corpse and a circle of colorful suspects into history. It also adds a bigger secret in a small envelope. Mystery is expensive, a mystery to all and a sentence to one. Using the intentional theatrics of an enclosed space and carefully calibrated mise-en-en-scene scenes, the author skillfully acts out the situation, perfectly owning the camera, building a stylish black and white world, literally electrified from various feelings, emotions and bare nerves intended for us by clues or cunning deceptions - it is extremely difficult to determine. Each character is filigree served on the screen even in a small gesture under the watchful guidance of the director, who has a great theatrical experience, which allowed the viewer to appear in the middle of the action and scenery, to catch any meaningful look, movement of the lips or sigh in the placed lyceums, as if on a chessboard, whose main task is always to cause distrust with all his strength. The level of suspicion is extremely high throughout the film, turning the film into a cunning puzzle non-stop. The saturated rhythm of the production is fully sustained, somehow constantly preserving and feeding the intrigue, throwing all new details of the relationship of the participants of the meeting or sudden plot twists. One of these will be the director’s curious appearance in a double role to play the stern police detective and his complete opposite, once the typical white detective’s cloak is thrown off his shoulders like a mask. It is this undisguised falsehood of his hero, deliberately filed from the very threshold, leads to an additional portion of suspicion, creating another round of events and discovering a new trick in an already action-packed story. In it, there is no viewer’s faith to anyone for a single moment, as if we ourselves are in the shoes of one of the company of “friends” who look at each other with doubt, including their wives, husbands, lovers, brothers and sisters, in order to rebuke and violently pounce. It seems that their secrets and covers will never run out even when the final credits come to the tune from Andre Ossein. The composer’s playful motif, worthy of some adventurous spy story, permeates the entire timekeeping, deftly decorating a tangle of lies that has confused together the always interesting genre components of insidious murder, limited space and a group of suspects whose secrets complicate the search for the guilty among worthy friends. The detective turned out to be very fascinating, because each of the characters vainly exalted himself, wanting to catch the other in greater baseness - tell me who your friend is, and I will tell you who you are.
8 out of 10