By Keri O’Shea
I hope I’m a reasonably neutral member of the team when it comes to the giallo genre – not really a big fan, but having seen a fair few by-the-by, enough to know what the features are. Essentially, I hope I came to the film without a weight of expectations. Reaching a verdict on neo-giallo Sonno Profondo was, though, harder than I’d imagined. It does some things profoundly, staggeringly well – and then trips over some very modern hurdles.
The basic plot is thus: our obligatory, black leather glove wearing psychopath wants to get to know the nice young lady slipping into lacy lingerie in her apartment (stop me if you’ve heard this one before). He sneaks his way in, and then pulls a knife – giving us the crime which sets up the rest of the story. There’s soon a twist in the tale, however. It seems that our glove guy’s crime did not go unobserved. Later, as he relaxes at home watching news footage of the murdered prostitute (as we now discover she was), an envelope gets pushed under his door. It contains photographs, taken of him as he killed the girl, and a phone number, which he hesitatingly calls at once. ‘She didn’t deserve that,’ croaks the voice on the other end of the line, before vowing vengeance on the girl’s murderer.
And so follows a game of cat and mouse, hidden identities and revelations. Yep, Sonno Profondo presses a lot of the giallo genre buttons from the get-go, and to give director Luciano Onetti his due, the attention to visual and audio detail in the film is exemplary – almost too good in parts, skirting the line between homage and pastiche. Let’s see; above and beyond the blood and black lace staple, the leather gloves and the ubiquitous bottle of J&B, we get to see a genuine giallo (the film genre was named for a type of popular yellow-cover crime magazine), other period magazines and television, and even the bedlinen is of the correct period (a Candlewick bedspread? Where the hell did they find that?) Then, there’s the meticulously observed colour palate, the incidental music, the film score; even the jerky, abrupt cuts between short and long shots ring true. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that Onetti, an Argentinian, shot the entire film in Italian. I think it’s fair to say that we have a fan on our hands here, and his knowledge is signposted very heavily, particularly in the film’s earlier scenes.
However, the killer’s eye view shooting style which seems like it’s going to be simply the opening chapter to the rest of the film – well, it never goes away, meaning that Sonno Profondo comes with a free case of tunnel vision, which limited my engagement with what was going on. The film also uses hand-held cameras for the most part, which jarred somewhat with the otherwise obvious giallo know-how; before very long, it became clear that this was the film itself as it was going to remain, and so we never escape the relentless sequences of macro shots, handcam and narrow field. With next to no dialogue (nearly all of the voices we hear are recorded or flashbacks) and only a couple of seconds where we get to see ‘character’ faces, before long the film begins to feel like an abstract exercise.
These odd stylistic choices soon begin to overpower the film. As it progresses (and at sixty-five minutes, it’s pretty short) it becomes harder to focus on the revelations which follow the initial crime at the beginning – I’ll admit, I had to go back and watch certain scenes again to try and understand what was going on. And that’s allowing for the fact that it’s more or less a commonplace giallo twist. To my mind, the film starts off very much anchored to giallo homage, and then begins moving away from that into far more experimental waters. How you’ll feel about that entirely depends on how far you’re willing to follow a director on account of his expert knowledge and a keen eye for visual detail.
Everyone seems to be ‘doing retro’ these days, with varying levels of success. Sonno Profondo is clearly the work of a director who knows and loves the material he has based his own film upon, and for a debut effort, it demonstrates ample ambition and painstaking care. However, stylistic choices have triumphed over substance in this case, meaning the film skirts perilously close to Amer territory, with visual style eclipsing an engaging narrative. Whether that is by choice or by omission on Onetti’s case, I cannot say for sure, but what we end up with is a glorious gamble which doesn’t quite come to fruition.