A mechanical eye, impersonal and predatory, ushers us into a theatre. Not just any stage, but the anatomical theatre of the psyche, where a childhood trauma is consummated in shadow, sealed by a chilling nursery rhyme and a falling knife. It is the overture to a symphony of neurosis, the prologue to an investigation that is less a police procedural than an ontological inquiry. With "Deep Red", Dario Argento doesn't merely codify the Italian giallo—a genre for which Mario Bava was the brilliant, painterly pioneer—he transcends it, contaminating it with the modernist paranoia of Antonioni and immersing it in a visual baroque that makes the fetishistic detail a key to deciphering the abyss.

The film is, first and foremost, a treatise on the fallibility of the gaze. Its protagonist, the jazz pianist Marc Daly (a David Hemmings who is almost an echo of his photographer in Blow-Up), is the quintessential witness: he sees the murder of the medium Helga Ulmann and rushes to the apartment, yet misses the essential detail. He is convinced he saw everything, but his brain, like Thomas’s camera in Antonioni’s masterpiece, has registered an incomplete image, an enigma hidden in plain sight. The entire narrative thus becomes the chronicle of a desperate attempt to “refocus,” to reconstruct a mnemonic puzzle whose missing piece is not an absence, but a misinterpreted presence. If in Blow-Up the photographic enlargement revealed an ambiguous and perhaps non-existent truth, here Marc’s search is a Freudian dive into the repressed, a journey backward in time to correct a flawed perception. The solution lies not in what is missing, but in what was looked at without being seen.

Argento orchestrates this hunt for the lost detail with the precision of a sadistic demiurge. His camera is no mere recording device but a sentient entity, a perverse voyeur that insinuates itself into spaces, slithers across floors, spies from impossible angles, and lingers with an almost pornographic obsession on objects: the glint of a blade, rolling glass marbles, the porcelain face of a mechanical doll. Every frame is a painterly composition that seems to quote Flemish still lifes as much as the hallucinatory perspectives of De Chirico. The urban topography of Turin, with its spectral Art Nouveau architecture and metaphysical piazzas, ceases to be a mere location and becomes the external projection of the characters' subconscious—a labyrinth of elegant façades concealing decaying corridors and unspeakable secrets.

The film breathes the stale, paranoid air of Italy’s Years of Lead. There are no direct political references, and it would be a mistake to look for them. The anguish is not ideological, but existential. It is the creeping sensation of a social and moral order in decay, where violence can erupt at any moment with an irrational, ritualistic fury. The murders in "Deep Red" are not functional acts toward a goal, but macabre performances, explosions of a madness with deep, private, almost mythological roots. The killer does not merely kill: they stage the death, aestheticizing it with a cruelty that is at once childish and fiercely calculated. In this, Argento reveals himself to be a meticulous architect of horror, constructing suspense sequences that dilate time to an unbearable degree, as in the long, masterful stalking of the writer Amanda Righetti, where every creak and shadow becomes an omen of an inevitable and spectacular demise.

Fundamental to this construction is the dialectic between the masculine and the feminine. Marc Daly is an impotent intellectual, an artist lost in his own theoretical virtuosities, incapable of acting effectively in the real world. He is the antithesis of the action hero. At his side, the journalist Gianna Brezzi (a brazen and thoroughly modern Daria Nicolodi) represents a new, emancipated, aggressive femininity, one that takes the initiative and constantly challenges Marc’s fragile masculinity. Their constant bickering is not simple comedy, but a symptom of cultural change, the clash of two worlds struggling to communicate. Yet even this seemingly strong female figure is not immune to the violence of a world that remains, at its core, patriarchal and predatory.

And then, there is the sound. The collaboration between Argento and Goblin is one of those cosmic alignments that define an era. The score does not accompany the images: it assaults them. The pounding prog-rock, with its distorted bass riffs and odd time signatures, erupts into scenes of tension, creating a powerfully jarring sensory short-circuit. It is anachronistic, out-of-place music that clashes with the formal elegance of the visuals and, for that very reason, amplifies their unsettling effect. Alongside this sonic chaos, the simple, terrifying, infantile lullaby acts as a Proustian madeleine in reverse: it does not evoke a nostalgic past, but unearths a buried trauma, becoming the sonic leitmotif of madness. Horror, Argento tells us, has the sound of a children’s song.

The film’s catalogue of grotesques—the effeminate, mother-obsessed son; the sadistic little girl; the professor obsessed with black folklore—is no gratuitous flourish, but helps to create a deviant universe, a gallery of bourgeois normality’s “monsters.” Each supporting character seems to carry a fragment of the madness that infests the narrative. The talking automaton that threatens Marc is not just a brilliant jump scare, but a potent metaphor: it is the mechanical incarnation of trauma, a past that returns with the voice and movements of a soulless puppet, anticipating the inhuman, almost robotic nature of the killer. It is a direct echo of the Freudian uncanny, of the terror that arises when the inanimate becomes animate—a literary call-back that stretches from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann to Fortunato Depero’s Mechanical Man.

The resolution, finally, is a stroke of genius that brings everything back to the beginning: the gaze. The truth was not in a missing painting, but in a mirror. Marc, and the viewer with him, had been looking at the reflection, the copy, mistaking it for reality the entire time. The revelation is an epiphany as simple as it is shattering, forcing a re-reading of the entire film in a new light. The deep red of the title is not just the color of blood, gushing forth in torrents, but the color of memory, a primordial hue that stains perception and infects the present. Marc’s final gaze, reflected in the killer’s pool of blood, brings the circle to a close. The investigator has become a part of the horror he has unveiled; he has gazed into the abyss, and the abyss has gazed back into him, staining his retina forever. "Deep Red" is not a horror film. It is an essay on the horror of seeing.