Next up, still at #114 on the S&S list, is this Nicolas Roeg movie that for some reason we are not calling a giallo. I mean, okay, I know why: It’s that Roeg is British and the rest of his career was in different types of movies. But if this movie had been made by an Italian director who made a bunch more movies like this, well, there wouldn’t be any question about it.

Because, yeah, it has all the ingredients: It takes place in Italy (Venice in the fall, gray and cloudy and decaying, setting a mood that persists through the film); it has some borderline-supernatural elements (an old blind lady who’s a psychic with a dire warning); it has a serial killer who’s killing women and throwing them into the canal; there are a lot of tense scenes with people seemingly in danger; it has a backdrop of eroticism, particularly in an extended sex scene; and it has a mystery-driven plot that ultimately doesn’t quite make sense if you think about it for too long. I watched this on a Criterion disc, but if I’d come across it on Shudder in between some Dario Argento movies, I wouldn’t think twice about it.

(Beyond genre classification, I think its Britishness is probably key to its position on this list. 27 critics put it into their personal top 10 list, and twenty of those were Brits, who I’m guessing saw it at an early point in their lives when it hit hard.)

All that might sound like a prologue to me dismissing this film as just a minor genre work, but I like gialli a lot, and this is a good one. It sets a mood effectively, and has great visuals — the grayness of most of the movie is offset by signature pops of red (not coincidentally the color of blood) that stand out visually, have plot significance, and do some unifying work thematically. It also uses editing to intercut different scenes in a way that isn’t obvious at first, and requires you to sort of tease out how the scenes it’s cutting between are related. But the thing that’s the most impressive is that even while its characters have the heightened, almost melodramatic, emotional state common to the genre, Roeg manages to ground it in a kind of psychological realism, where much of the heightened emotion is a normal and reasonable response to intense events.

But what ultimately keeps this movie from greatness for me is its ending. It begins promisingly, with an intense bit of character interaction followed by a tense chase across the empty night-time canals and bridges of Venice; but it ends with an absurdity that retroactively cheapens some of the psychological mystery that had come before. It’s just a legitimately terrible ending; it seems like most people agree on this point, and the question is just where you land on the “but still, the rest of the film…” evaluation.

For my part, I’d put it as an upper-mid-tier giallo; it feels a little highly rated on this list — I’d probably swap it with Suspiria, which is down at #211 (and might make my personal top ten list depending on my mood on any given day) — but it is good, so I’m not mad at it.