A series of vicious crimes, which finds its most violent expression with the extermination of a couple and a voyer, is characterized by clues that lead one to circumscribe the perpetrator as a possible hunter.
The killer, in a delusional and vicious destructive action, takes from some corpses parts of their bodies: a breast, arms, a head....
Assigned to follow up the investigation, Inspector Amaldi (Luigi Lo Cascio) immerses himself as much as possible in the mind of the killer, while simultaneously establishing an emotional relationship with the young university student Giuditta (Lucìa Jimenéz) who is troubled by repeated and continuous phone threats.
Some deductions move the investigation into the field of taxidermy, and the perpetrator manifests, in addition to a certain erudition (developed around alchemy), a rare surgical skill.
The possible solution revolves around former police officer, Ajaccio (Simòn Andreu), now hospitalized due to an illness that has reduced him to the terminal stage.
The setting in an indefinite city (in reality, Sofia), the exteriors set in the abandoned port, the memories of the policeman destined for an atrocious fate and in a "terminal" phase, the crude sequences of the first crime (reminiscent, in mode, of the real-life ones of the Monster of Florence), the pertinent music well set in the narrative context make Crystal Eyes a happy example of great Italian cinema. Hastily related to "genre" cinema, and forcibly placed in a hypothetical following of the lofty models of Argento or Bava, Puglielli's film dares where even the most established international horror filmmakers, today, stop (from Craven to Argento, via Hooper): that is, it shows tough sequences with prominence of grisly details (the amputations and wounds of the corpses), creates an unbearable and uncomfortable atmosphere of tension, and reworks in a totally personal way some concepts of Italian genre cinema (the killer revealed only at the end), cloaked in a broader atmosphere, which seems to derive (in a still personal way) from films like Seven and Manhunter (for the identification of the inspector in the mind of the killer), from The Rivers of Purple (the writing on the wall with blood) or from Balaguerò (Nameless, Darkness)...
If some elements may be reminiscent of Argento, but in a very distant way, perhaps this can be attributed to the hand in the screenplay of Franco Ferrini, a regular collaborator of the Roman director, and to the director's use of story-boards (by Zhivko Zhelyazkov) to support the screenplay, of which he made excellent use. For the rest, rather, the ending (with the body plunging into the sea from the top of the abandoned Orphanage) evokes memories of a couple of Fulci's films (Non si sevizia un paperino and Sette note in nero).
Review by Undying1
