Fascinatingly dark and elusive, 'La Donna Del Lago' (aka) 'The Possessed' (1965) ominously remains a thrillingly enigmatic, majestically mysterious, almost impenetrable crypto-Giallo by the consistently excellent film stylist, Luigi Bazzoni, the prodigiously talented, intellectual auteur behind equally idiosyncratic, doom-laden, darkly dreamt anti-Gialli masterpiece, 'Footsteps on the Moon'(1975). Since 'La Donna Del Lago' was also written by fellow dramatic iconoclast, Gulio 'Death Laid an Egg' Questi, one might certainly expect to experience a similarly oblique tone, and in terms of starkly confounding genre conventions, skewed scrivener, Questi most certainly doesn't disappoint! While some might consider 'Lady of The Lake' to be just another indulgent example of overwrought nouvelle vague-esque cinematic doodling; but to blithely dismiss this eerily elegiac work as mere self-indulgence is, perhaps, to miss out of one of Italian genre cinema's most glacial,immaculately shot, singularly strange, wickedly off-key, noggin-scratchingly unique thrillers!
Review of The Possessed
The Possessed
(1965)
Luigi Bazzoni's enigmatic, almost impenetrable quasi-giallo is a visual treat!
23 January 2014