Four Flies on Grey Velvet Reviews

Convoluted, stylish, and insidiously disturbing, Italian horror icon Dario Argento's third film is a classic example of the Italian giallo genre. Giallo means yellow, and refers to the fact that mystery novels are, in Italy, often packaged with yellow covers. But the gialli aren't just mysteries: they're mystery thrillers in which perverted madness lurks behind every smiling face and the threat of violence poisons relationships between friends, families, and lovers. Drummer Roberto Tobias (Michael Brandon) accidentally kills a man who has been following him for weeks, and the murder is witnessed by a mysterious figure in a smiling puppet mask, who takes pictures. Roberto's life quickly unravels: someone tries to blackmail him, he's haunted by nightmares, and his relationship with his wealthy, high-strung wife Nina (Mimsey Farmer) becomes increasingly strained. Their maid, a detective Roberto hires to investigate, and Nina's cousin Dalia (Francine Racette) are all murdered. When Dalia's eyeball is photographed by the coroner, he finds that it has retained the last image she saw before dying: four flies against a murky background. This clue leads nowhere until Tobias--now almost mad with fear--is confronted by his wife and notices the pendant she's wearing: a lucite disk with a fly suspended in the center. Nina, it ensues, is violently insane. Her father was a sadist who tormented her as a child. She married Roberto because he looked exactly like her dad, who died before she was old enough to exact her revenge. She plotted to ruin his life, and her plan ends with murder. But Roberto is saved by the arrival of a friend, and Nina is killed when, while trying to escape, she drives her car into the back of a truck and is decapitated. Some dodgy performances aside, FOUR FLIES is a briskly paced and consistently intriguing puzzle, even if it's one in which the pieces never do quite fit together. But that's part of what makes Argento's thrillers so disquieting: they revel in their loose ends, always hinting at more nasty secrets waiting to be exposed and suggesting that anyone trying to plumb the depths of the world's wickedness is doomed to drown in it.