Enigmatic and obscurant, a movie noir bathed in gloom and goals inside goals, its “story” carried by voice-over narration, “The Possessed” is an Italian homicide thriller all however conceived as a “cult image.”

It had a number of titles — “La donna del lago (The Girl of the Lake)” in Italy, “Love, Hate and Dishonor” on U.S. TV, and “The Possessed,” as it’s titled right this moment. It was title-checked in Quentin Tarantino’s Nineteen Sixties pop-culture Easter egg basket “As soon as Upon a Time…in Hollywood.”

Co-directors Luigi Bazzoni and Franceso Rossellini are largely forgotten figures now. The sound seems to be all post-production looped, and the star — Peter Baldwin — had bit components in movies and American TV, however a couple of starring roles in Italian movies within the ’60s, earlier than coming house and dealing steadily as a director of TV sitcoms for many years.

The movie is principally an try at artwork home Hitchcock, one thing tried in a couple of Italian movies of the period. This obscurant and considerably mesmerizing movie grabs and holds one’s curiosity, and never simply the racier bits typically edited out for American TV.

Baldwin performs Bernard, an award-winning novelist who’s contemporary off a break-up, needing an low season trip. He’s a daily at a lodge by a lake which his household used to go to when he was younger.

There was this blonde there, Tilde, a housekeeper on the lodge. Bernard should have been infatuated along with her. Why else would he ring for her, solely to get a special housekeeper? He sees a coat he acknowledges and is aware of she is close to. He fantasizes or maybe remembers spying on her lovemaking by a crack in a door. Or maybe he was her lover.

In any occasion, he’s decided to trace down this magnificence (performed by Virna Lisi). After which, after others have averted his questions on her, he will get the information. She died.

“Suicide,” the hotelier (Salvo Randone) sighs. “Poison.”

However the poison in her mouth and her abdomen didn’t kill her, the conspiracy-minded native photographer (Pier Giovanni Anchisi) tells Bernard. Her throat was minimize!

That sends Bernard on a downward spiral of “investigation,” maybe for a brand new ebook, and goals by which he imagines a few males as Tilde’s lover — the hotelier, and his butcher son (Philippe Leroy).

The hotelier’s daughter (Valentina Cortese) has a shifty manner about her. The butcher’s spouse (Pia Lindström) is hidden from public view, mysteriously pushed to stroll the lake shore late at night time.

What’s occurring right here? Why are so many “clues” and suspects launched in goals? Is the man who runs the lodge on the town actually “highly effective” and able to overlaying up a criminal offense?

Asking questions, nonetheless obliquely, doesn’t a lot present Bernard with solutions as enable him to dream out many eventualities, with none of them provable in court docket, not that the police are all that considering re-opening this “banal suicide.”

Co-directors Bazzoni and Rossellini (the nephew of legendary director Roberto Rossellini) prioritize temper over thriller, however one reinforces the opposite on this puzzling narrative. The movie is usually talked about as belonging within the style of lurid “Giallo” homicide mysteries and violent tales of ’60s Italian cinema. But it surely’s not often something greater than a movie noir that struggles to make sense.

The hoary voice-over gadget is novelistic, higher at telling us Bernard’s frame of mind than at serving to him remedy this thriller.

“The Possessed” is designed to frustrate, to make us surprise if Bernard feels chargeable for this dying and if this ties into his break-up, by cellphone, with one other girl earlier than making the journey.

It could make extra sense in its barely longer model, and Lisi is a fiery, beguiling display screen presence, even on this. However it is a limp thriller that reminds us that typically a “cult movie” is much less fascinating than the explanations a cult shaped round it within the first place.

Ranking: unrated, violence, sexual conditions

Solid: Peter Baldwin, Salvo Randone, Pia Lindström,
Philippe Leroy, Pier Giovanni Anchisi, Valentina Cortese and Virna Lisi

Credit: Directed by Luigi Bazzoni and Franceso Rossellini, scripted by Giulio Questi, Luigi Bazzoni, Franceso Rossellini and Ernesto Gastaldi, based mostly on a novel by Giovanni Comisso. An American Worldwide launch now on Tubi

Operating time: 1:25 on some prints, 1:35 on others