Deep Red

Film Review by Rachel Bowles | 05 Oct 2015
Film title: Deep Red
Director: Dario Argento
Starring: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Méril
Release date: 5 Oct
Certificate: 18

Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) is prolific Italian horror auteur Dario Argento’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, and arguably the definitive magnum opus of giallo. Strongly influencing American slasher flicks, most notably John Carpenter’s Halloween, Deep Red spectacularly realises Argento’s unique stylistic formalism and thematic obsessions that made the supernatural Suspiria, his subsequent film, his most popular work.

Much like Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, in which trauma is also inexorably linked to the eponymous semiotic colour, Deep Red is concerned with the trials of an artistic Anglophone in Italy. Jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), having perchance witnessed a horrific, bloody murder of a psychic, decides to hunt down the killer, who simultaneously stalks both him and anyone who can help solve his macabre puzzle. Expect prog rockers Goblin, creepy lullabies, free-associating psychoanalytic imagery, freewheeling cinematography, gothic re-imagined as lurid psychedelia, queering of gender and pints and pints of bright red blood. [Rachel Bowles]


Released by Arrow Film