Profondo Rosso: What Did I Just See?

For as long as I’ve been writing this thing (holy shit it’s been ten years), there are still gaps in my horror film education, and every now and then I try to fill those gaps as best as I can. A couple of weeks back I noted that even though I could tell A Classic Horror Story drew from a tradition of Italian horror, I hadn’t actually seen many examples of the style. So, with Italian horror on my mind, I decided to take a look at Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), directed by genre mainstay Dario Argento, whose Suspiria I covered here some time back.

Let me tell you, this film was a ride, for reasons both good and bad, equal parts fascinating, strange, tiresome, and frustrating.

The film opens on the silhouette of someone stabbing someone else to death, overlaid with a child singing, so you know we’re in for the weird shit. We cut from this to a talk being given by a psychic about her abilities, interrupted by her near-hysteric reaction that someone in the audience has killed and will kill again. We cut from that to the psychic in her apartment, finishing a phone call, only to be stabbed to death by a mysterious figure in black leather gloves.

Meanwhile, jazz pianist Marcus Daly and his friend Carlo are having a drunken, spirited discussion about their approaches to music as they stumble toward Marcus’ apartment building. where it just so happens the psychic is his upstairs neighbor. They get there just in time to see her get murdered and pushed out the window onto the pavement.

What follows is - well, loosely - Marcus, along with reporter Gianna Brezzi, trying to solve this strange murder, only to find every lead they chase ending in another murder. This film is best described as jarring. It’s not as visually riotous as Suspiria, but the soundtrack is heavily dominated by the kind of rock music you might associate more with 70s cop shows than horror films, all keyboards and percussion and guitar. Sometimes it undermines the tension of the scene, but then others it lends a real strangeness that gets under your skin. There’s just something so odd about chase-scene music applied to someone creeping through an apartment that your brain doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

This extends to the editing and direction as well. Transitions between scenes are abrupt, sometimes mid-conversation, and even the most straightforward scenes are punctuated with close-ups on otherwise innocuous things like running faucets, squawking birds, open doorways, and random strangers in the street, rapidly cutting back and forth in a way that gives those scenes a real sense of anxiety. If that’s not enough, the action is periodically interrupted by close-ups on baby dolls and lingering, almost fetishistic shots of the black leather gloves worn by the killer. No context is provided for these interludes, they just sort of happen. And sometimes it’s almost played for comedy, as in a phone exchange made difficult by a noisy cafe and uncomfortably close espresso machine.

A lot of this film is outside of cinematic convention, and I think that both helps and harms it. On the one hand, the relentless strangeness and tonal whiplash makes it an uneasy watch, simply because you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. It’s one of those films where it feels like all bets are off. But on the other, it’s extremely hard to follow (and there’s a reason for that, more on that in a bit) and individual scenes really seem to take place in a vacuum, causally disconnected from what came before or what comes after, It plays at times less like a single narrative and more like a series of loosely related vignettes. It was also made in 1975, and its takes on gender and sexual orientation are very much of that time period, which is to say they’re pretty gross by modern standards. The sexism isn’t great, but it’s more eye-rolling than anything else, but the homophobia is pretty unpleasant in depiction and how it plays into the narrative. Sensitivities to this sort of thing vary, and I’m usually pretty able to look past stuff based on cultural context, but this left a bad taste in my mouth.

All of that said, I’m not sure all of the film’s problems were its fault. The sexism and homophobia, sure, but the version I watched (one I’d…ahem….obtained…some time ago) was clearly a transfer from VHS (detectable in the tracking errors that popped up toward the end of the film), and so it was pretty murky and fuzzy, which didn’t help matters. Also, after doing a little research on IMDB, I was able to determine that it was a heavily edited version released in the U.S., with about 20 minutes of its run time excised. This apparently took out a lot of graphic violence (some of the cuts being obvious in the print I saw) along with a couple of subplots, and what appeared to be most of the actual interaction between Marcus and Gianna. Truth be told, the editing on the version I saw seemed like such a hack job that I can only imagine that at least some of the disorienting abruptness wasn’t intentional. Still, the film’s basic vision shines through, and it’s a deeply weird one. It doesn’t look like the unedited version is available on streaming services, and I’m not sure I liked it enough to purchase a Blu-Ray of it, but this one seems like it’s going to need some kind of revisit at some point.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon