The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears

This bastard child of Argento and Dali had audience members streaming out of its Toronto festival screening, as those expecting something comparable to Berberian Sound Studio were delivered a nasty surprise; poor dears.  This isn’t about Giallo; it is Giallo. Its genre motifs - the black leather glove, the stiletto blade - are more than just ironic knowing winks. Leaving nothing to the imagination it burns savagely beautiful images into the viewer's retina, but by following Argento in using this beauty to heighten the senses, it raises the moral dilemma of whether murder (primarily of women) should be stylised in such ways. What Peter Strickland left opaque, this makes flesh; then flays it. 

A man’s wife goes missing in an apartment block of oddities and grotesques that rival Polanski’s The Tennant. He is then stalked through a deadly, labyrinth dreamscape by the mysterious Laura. It is a sensory experience of jarringly cut, hugely impressive psychedelic images and imposing sound. The red of danger and, more importantly, sex (La petit morte), is prevalent throughout the primary coloured film. Its arthouse pretentions fail to distance it from the Italian classics, instead coating it in the unhinged residue of Fulci’s Lizard in a Woman’s Skin or Bazzoni’s Le Orme. It’s a confusing and demanding film, at times exhausting; so subjective as to defy simple rating. When a character questions whether to ‘appease or resist,’ I asked myself the same. [Alan Bett]