Critics reviews

These are all evidence of a keen eye, and Losey’s experience making sharp genre films in Hollywood and Europe. While Losey’s style was often unfairly criticised as “baroque, or over-ornate”, here it is perfectly balanced in its composition.

Both [Eva and The Servant] have impressive but obtrusive jazz scores (by Michel Legrand and Johnny Dankworth, respectively) that seem designed to smother or at least simplify the intellectual issues with emotional bombast, and the almost abject reliance on Antonioni's notions of decadence (especially strident in Eva) makes the arabesques of the camera movements not so much circles around a void as pirouettes around a borrowed void.

Losey reconfigures the drama as an imagistic rapture, a kind of cinematic action painting in which his agitated camera scores the screen with the harsh trails of rugged textures. Shimmering waves and intricate ironwork, façades of decaying masonry and the stark outlines of bare foliage are transformed into furious abstractions of inner agony.

Losey at his most extravagant savors the territory, tearing exuberantly through the languor while helping himself to Gianni Di Venanzo and Henri Decaë and Michel Legrand. With the lid blown off, his obsessions stream out voluminously, promiscuously.