Eye in the Labyrinth (1972)

Original title: L'occhio nel labirinto

Following a dream in which she sees him stabbed to death in somewhat labyrinthine surroundings, Julie (Rosemary Dexter), starts to investigate the disappearance of her psychiatrist and lover Luca (Horst Frank). Nobody else, not even his colleagues, seem all that bothered by his disappearance to places unknown, but then, everything we learn about the guy’s character throughout the movie suggests they are most probably throwing a secret party celebrating his absence when Julie’s not looking.

Something’s really fishy about Luca’s fate, though. For one, an armed guy with a gun appears and attempts to smack Luca’s whereabouts out of Julie, something that only strengthens her resolve to find out what’s going on. Not enough to get her to go to the police, mind you, for she has visa issues. Once our heroine manages to find some curious clues leading to a small coastal town where Luca might have gone to, things turn really strange. There are repeated, awkward, attempts at Julie’s life, while her most helpful contact is a gropy disgraced American gangster (Adolfo Celi) who now lives in the cellar of an orphanage. Every other man she meets is a sleaze and/or a voyeur, too.

Eventually, Julie finds out that Luca stayed for some time at a villa on a nearby island where a group of weird bohemians flock around a female millionaire, but what he did there and where he went are quite different questions.

Internally, I had Eye in the Labyrinth’s director Maria Caiano flagged as the kind of Italian genre director who managed to follow every fad and make decent and entertaining but not spectacular movies in it. This giallo, though, is very special indeed. While it is absolutely fulfilling its genre quota of nudity (Julie does tend to undress at the slightest provocation) and violence, it also really hits a wonderful point of low budget surrealism: everything around our heroine takes on the visual qualities of a labyrinth, be it the run-down building that nearly collapses on her head at the beginning, the orphanage or even the villa; everything is filmed with a sense of slight dislocation. In fact, there’s so much of it, the film doesn’t even have to bother with a trip scene when somebody takes actual LSD.

There’s also a wonderful thread of paranoia running through the film. It’s not just that everyone here is a shit heel with no ethical values (and Luca probably was the worst of them all, turning Julie’s search for him more than just a little ironic and sad even before she finds out the identity of the killer). Motives are shifting and dubious too, as are genders, sexual interests and power structures between people. It’s a world where you can’t be sure of anyone, and where even the strange orphan boy who might be your best witness is also a sleazy little voyeur watching you while you sleep (of course in the nude, because Julie does everything in the nude). Julie is confronted with an astonishing amount of sexual harassment of one kind or the other too. The film’s never quite saying that this sort of pressure on a young woman is one of the shittiest elements of the society it takes place in and may have dire consequences for everyone involved, deforming trust and human connections in the worst possible ways, but it is most certainly suggesting it, at least when you’re watching it today.

Of course, human connection and trust twisted and deformed, and how this twists and deforms the human subject does seem to be the main theme running through Eye in the Labyrinth – apart from nudity and violence, of course – with nearly every scene, sometimes in an underhanded and tricky way you’ll only get later on like the business with a witness and a car, making a practical demonstration of some of these things, until stabbing someone to death seems rather more like a logical reaction to circumstances than madness.