Profondo rosso (Deep Red [original Italian release version]). 1975. Italy. Directed by Dario Argento. In Italian; English subtitles. 127 min.
Screenplay by Argento, Bernardino Zapponi. With David Hemmings, Daria Nicoldi, Gabriele Lavia. Dario Argento is a master of Italian giallo, the hyper-aestheticized and eroticized genre of horror, mystery, and suspense that was first articulated by his mentor, Mario Bava, in the 1960s. Argento has overseen the Cineteca Nazionale’s new digital restoration of the original Italian release version of one of his greatest works, Deep Red, the film that bridges his early trilogy of psychological thrillers (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o’ Nine Tails, Four Flies on Gray Velvet), the supernaturalism of his mid-career Suspiria and Tenebre, and the Grand Guignol shock tactics of his late-period splatter movies. Argento’s bravura use of disorienting camera angles, hallucinatory sounds, mirror images, and razor-sharp edits is put to the service of a particularly nasty and inventively choreographed series of pathological murders that David Hemmings, still carrying the swinging London stylishness of Antonioni’s Blow Up, must solve. Restored digitally by the CSC–Cineteca Nazionale with the collaboration of RTI-Mediaset; courtesy of RTI-Mediaset.