Being Film #4 for Hooptober 2025
Films like The Possessed, or La Donna del Lago in its original Italian, are the reason I constantly try to seek out new films whenever Hooptober comes around. A proto-giallo that also functions as an Italian noir evoking the dream-like narratives David Lynch would forge just over a decade later, it’s a gorgeously shot film that takes the plot mechanics of what the genre would come to be known for, but drapes it under a blanket of striking black and white photography and ambiguous sequences that play as both dream, premonition and clues to the mystery surrounding its characters.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Bernard is a successful writer who has it all…except the mysterious Tilde, a maid who infatuated him while staying at a small hotel on the outskirts of an even smaller town near the lake. He dumps his current love and returns to the hotel, ostensibly to write his next novel but really to find Tilde. When he learns from Enrico, the kind old hotel owner that Tilde unfortunately took her own life at the lake, Bernard finds it hard to believe. Soon he and Francesco, the hunchbacked photo developer begin unravelling the mysteries of Tilde, Enrico, and his family, including distraught daughter Emma and the hot-headed son Mario, recently returned from his honeymoon with foreign bride Adriana in tow. Bernard soon start dreaming, hallucinating clues that may or may not exist as he digs into disturbing family secrets and a trial of murder than begins to grow the closer he gets to…the lady by the lake!
Part of Arrow Video’s excellent Giallo box set collections (the red one, to be exact), The Possessed is more a progenitor than the actual thing. There are no gloved hands or shockingly violent murders, and the exquisite black and white photography by Leonida Barboni gives everything more of a nightmarish noir than anything resembling what we’ve come to know from the likes of Dario Argento or Mario Bava.
With a host of co-writers whittling away at the story, based on one of Italy’s most notorious true crime murders, director Luigi Bazzoni makes great use of locations to instill a level of verisimilitude while simultaneously evoking a dreamlike state as Bernard slowly slips in and out of a madness brought on with his obsession to understand not only what happened to Tilde, but who she actually was as opposed to the unobtainable vision held in his head for so long.
Clever editing always keeps the viewer on their toes: every time we get a clue or observation that might bring us closer to the truth Bazzoni cuts to Bernard waking up in bed. Was it a dream? The same scene, of Bernard looking through a door and seeing Tilde making love to someone goes through multiple permutations as Bernard contemplates who it could have been, and if they could have killed her. Things become even more complicated when it’s intuited that she was pregnant at the time.
Or was she? Everything is cast into doubt, and as we get closer to the finale Bazzoni makes the visual argument that the truth will never matter to Bernard, whose obsession will cause him to conjure up whatever will allow him to accept Tilde, and it seems the police and authorities are willing to go along with that, too. The secret, as revealed to us through Bernard’s unreliable narrative is one of incest and depravity, and the family at the hotel could all have been involved. As more murders occur we narrow down our search, but the truth behind it becomes more and more disturbing, so much you being to understand just why things are so confused and covered and accepted in an effort to simply move on.
Another fantastic discovery, one I was glad didn’t hew so closely to the standard giallo script, instead giving us something more sinister and ambiguous. The Possessed succeeds by hiding its secrets in shadows we can’t penetrate. We can only guess, and live with those guesses.
The rest is too much to contemplate.
Cinema Dual 