A framed portrait dominates the funereal luxury of a New York apartment. It is no simple prop, but a portal, a Byzantine icon transplanted into the twentieth century, the MacGuffin of the soul around which Otto Preminger orchestrates his symphony of obsessions. It is the face of Laura Hunt, the murdered woman whose disfigured corpse lies in the morgue. Or so it seems. Before we even meet a single character in the flesh, we meet her, or rather, her sublime idealization. It is from this pictorial fetish that "Laura" (1944) unfurls, a work that only a lazy eye could file away as a simple noir. In reality, it is a treatise on platonic necrophilia, a séance disguised as a police investigation, a fever dream born from the opulence of World War II’s Café Society.

Detective Mark McPherson (a granitic, almost catatonic Dana Andrews) is our Virgil in this high-class inferno. But unlike the hardboiled hounds of Chandler or Hammett, his cynicism is a thin veneer, destined to be corroded by the acid of desire. Upon entering Laura’s apartment, he isn't just investigating a murder; he is performing an act of archaeological voyeurism. He reads her letters, sniffs her perfumes, sips her liquors, almost wears her identity. And above all, he stares at that portrait. His investigation becomes a posthumous courtship. He falls in love with a ghost, with a narrative constructed from the partial and toxic memories of those who knew her. Here, Preminger makes a metacinematic gesture of rare intelligence: McPherson becomes the ultimate spectator, falling in love not with a person, but with a projected image, a story assembled from fragments of light and shadow.

The principal architect of this ghost is Waldo Lydecker, played by Clifton Webb in one of the most corrosive and memorable performances in cinema history. Lydecker, an influential and venomous columnist, is the Pygmalion of the story. He “created” Laura, molding her from a naïve girl into a style icon, and like any jealous demiurge, he cannot bear for his creation to develop a will of its own. His narration, which opens the film in a mellifluous and arrogant voice-over, is the first apocryphal Gospel of Saint Laura. Webb, who came from the theater and whom Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck hesitated to cast, deeming him "too effeminate," brings to the screen a figure of the toxic intellectual, whose weapon is not the pistol but the fountain pen, whose venom is wit. His apartment, a den of antiques and narcissism with a bathtub in plain sight from which he dispenses judgments, is the temple of his ego. His relationship with Laura is not sexual; it is aesthetic, possessive, authorial. He is the artist who wants to sign his masterpiece with blood, if necessary.

Then there is the fiancé, Shelby Carpenter (a slimy and charming Vincent Price), a Southern parasite whose beauty is directly proportional to his moral weakness. If Lydecker represents intellectual obsession, Carpenter embodies carnal and opportunistic desire. Neither man loves Laura, but what Laura represents to them: a trophy, a status symbol, a mirror for their own insecurities. Into this triangle of men orbiting an absence, McPherson inserts himself as the unwelcome fourth, the one who desires the pure ideal, the essence distilled from the portrait, uncontaminated by reality.

And then, halfway through the film, comes the plot twist that elevates "Laura" from an excellent thriller to a philosophical masterpiece. Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney, whose almost supernatural beauty is essential to the film’s success) walks in. She is alive. The disfigured body belonged to someone else. The idol once again becomes flesh. The impact of this moment is devastating. The ghost has become incarnate, Galatea has stepped down from her pedestal, and the disappointment is palpable. For Lydecker, she is a creation that has once again slipped from his grasp. For McPherson, it is the trauma of having to confront his perfect dream with a real, complex, perhaps even disappointing woman. From this point on, the film ceases to be an investigation into “who killed Laura?” and becomes a reflection on “who is Laura?” The answer is that Laura is, above all, a projection. Her identity is a battlefield on which men fight to impose their own version. She is the blank canvas on which each man paints his own desires and fears.

This formal and thematic perfection was born, as is so often the case, from production chaos. The original director, Rouben Mamoulian, was fired after a few weeks. It was Preminger, initially just the producer, who took the reins, scrapping almost all the previous footage and imposing his own frigid and analytical vision. He insisted on Clifton Webb against Zanuck’s advice. He replaced the photograph of Gene Tierney that Mamoulian wanted with a painted portrait, understanding that the idealization had to be manifest, artistic, not realistic. His directorial style is one of glacial modernity: the camera moves with an almost spectral fluidity, observing the characters like an entomologist, trapping them in opulent sets that become their gilded cages. There is none of the overwrought expressionism of much film noir; the darkness here is not in the streets, but in the luxury apartments, in the minds of the protagonists.

And how could one fail to mention David Raksin’s score? Legend has it that Raksin, tasked with composing the main theme in a single weekend after Preminger had rejected Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” found his inspiration after receiving a farewell letter from his wife. That personal melancholy was transfused into one of the most obsessive and poignant melodies ever written for the cinema. The theme of "Laura" is not mere accompaniment; it is the film’s very breath, the sonic equivalent of the portrait, a motif that hovers constantly, evoking absence, desire, and a romanticism steeped in death.

Released in 1944, in an America still immersed in the war effort, "Laura" offered an escape into a world of elegance and intrigue, but beneath the polished surface, it concealed a profoundly modern disquiet. If classic noir chronicled the corruption of the city and the fall of the hero, Preminger’s film shifted the battlefield to the interior of the psyche. It is a work that anticipates by almost fifteen years its spiritual namesake, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in its probing of the madness of a man who tries to shape a living woman into the image of a dead lover. But where Hitchcock explodes in a baroque, operatic work, Preminger wields a scalpel, with surgical precision and analytical coldness.

"Laura" is more than a film; it is a box of poisoned dreams. A perfect clockwork mechanism—symbolized by the rococo clock in Lydecker’s apartment, which will be revealed as a murder weapon—that dismantles the very concept of romantic love, showing it for what it often is: an overbearing act of imagination, a desperate attempt to possess not a person, but the idea we have constructed of them. And when the detective, at the end, “wins” the woman, we cannot help but wonder which Laura he has truly won: the real one, or the one he continued to dream of, even after seeing her in the flesh, as he gazed, enchanted, at her portrait. The answer, like Raksin’s melody, remains suspended in the air, wonderfully unresolved.