Giulio (Elio Germano) is a young university student pursuing his studies on German expressionist cinema: renting several films from a video store.
While, much to his delight, he spends his evenings spying on the beautiful woman across the street, Sasha (Elisabetta Rocchetti), who doesn't skimp on full-length strip-teases with an open window...
But that's not all: Julius, by dint of spying on the neighbor, realizes that she lives a frictional relationship with her mother... until he witnesses, to his horror, a brutal crime, the victim Sasha's mother.
Initially the whole thing appears to be the work of a burglar, sneaking into the apartment.
Until Giulio remembers vividly that Sasha had rented Hitchcock's film Murder by Murder, making the acquaintance of Federica (Chiara Conti): a girl he discovers is being blackmailed by her employer, who shows morbid sexual attentions to her, resulting in rape...
By now embroiled in his reckless investigation, and a victim of morbid voyeurism, Julius is unaware that he is putting his own life at risk: he begins, in fact, to confide his suspicions both to his perplexed girlfriend and to the owner of the video store...
According to him, Sasha and Federica, inspired by the plot of Hitchcock's film, are performing a kind of “exchange” crime, eliminating the two people most inconvenient to them...
Sasha, in fact inherited a large capital after the death of her strict mother and enjoys an unassailable alibi...
But in doing so, the door of danger opens wide for Julius: a reckless act of espionage, forcing him immobile and plastered in his apartment, the focus of a mysterious killer's attentions...
Dario Argento's return to television, from the days of La Porta sul Buio (1974) and Giallo (1987), with a film commissioned by Rai Trade, initially as a pilot for a series focusing on detective stories set in different Italian cities: with quotationist aims (for Argento: Hitchcock) that were also supposed to interest the style of Lucio Fulci...
But the series is, at the moment, in a hypothetical limbo: nothing is known about a possible continuation (only one more film would be made for Argento) and the release of this first chapter was only at a few festivals, remaining unreleased so far on the small screen...
Argento attempts, as far as possible, to go the TV movie route: achieving a result that ranks positively, but not memorably...
While it is evident, in the end, to grasp the author's sense of deep love for the art of filmmaking in his soul (with obvious homages to Hitchcock himself and Rear Window especially), it is equally blatant that the operation is carried out “under” the eyes of an unofficial but heavy-handed censorship...
The music, by Pino Donaggio, is at a decent level and the actors do what they can: and in some cases they even do it well (Elio Germani and, above all, the beautiful Chiara Conti); but it is the overly specious screenplay (by Ferrini, a regular collaborator of the director) and decidedly predictable that leaves time to be found...
Of course: on closer inspection, fiction can only be gratified by such a product, as the air of cinema clearly shines through and the quality of the operation -on the whole- is above average...
And Argento finds the energy and strength to carry on, bringing to fruition his next work intended for cable broadcast: the excellent Jenifer episode of the American series Masters of Horror...
Review by Undying1
