Critics reviews

All the grotesquely bloody murders of Argento’s previous detective stories are here present and correct... This film is very good, but also distinctly trashy...

Argento revels in over-the-top horror that toes the line between ridiculous and disturbing.

Each of Deep Red’s compositions reveals new meanings upon each viewing—and so it’s no wonder that yards of essays have been written trying to get to the center of this film.

As such a leading work in the genre, Deep Red similarly exudes an exemplary sense of deliberate pacing, creating a far more methodical atmospheric unease than The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears' blazing bombardment. In combination with its single images of fright (a walking, squawking automaton is particularly disconcerting), Argento masterfully crafts what Zapponi calls an "evil discomfort.

A breakthrough picture for Argento. His prior films were stylized giallos with enticing titles but they were, to a certain extent, bound by genre convention. That is, they played by the rules. "Deep Red" was louder, nastier, more violent, more irrational than anything he had done before. It threw down a gauntlet that other filmmakers, including extremists such as Lucio Fulci, would be inclined to pick up in ways that redefined sadistic cinema for better or worse.

It's elegant and witty but also shocking and cruel. The contrived deaths involve bleeding bodies shoved through broken windows, scalding in the bath, teeth smashed against a mantelpiece, someone being dragged along behind a garbage truck and decapitation via necklace caught in a lift grille. Yet almost as memorable are odd frills such as the sudden appearance of a clockwork puppet and a disturbed little girl who is plainly going to grow up to be the next generation of psychopath.

An exercise in the extension of suspense, DEEP RED is pure alchemy, transmuting spaces into death, camera moves into murder, swathes of color into madness. Argento is at the top of his powers here, brilliantly orchestrating his actors through the frame like dolls in a toy slaughterhouse, making no moral or clinical distinction between the dying and the living, between killing a man and composing a song, between unearthing a secret and slicing a neck.

Despite his contentious bickering with Nicolodi, Hemmings is a bland protagonist. That shortcoming, however, doesn't diminish Deep Red's power, which thanks to Argento's sleek and sharply honed stewardship, hums with sinister sensuality.

Operating under the principle that a moving camera is always better than a static one, and not above throwing in a terrifying evil doll, Deep Red showcases the technical bravado and loopy shock tactics that made Argento famous.

Deep Red marks a crucial transition in Argentos career: a move away from conventional giallo mystery-thrillers into more a more experimental mix of art film and splatterfest horror. While the results are often messy, not just in terms of onscreen bloodshed, this is the most fascinating kind of failure, a necessary stepping-stone to his masterpiece, Suspiria.

This is Argento’s intent though—to scare and awe the spectator so that he or she won’t see the obvious. The film’s final piece de resistance evokes the elusiveness of memory but, more importantly, shows that the identity of the film’s killer was always available to the careful spectator.

This is not a film for the faint-hearted but unlike some Argento movies that are all gory style over substance, "Deep Red" is a stunning thriller. Its power lies in both its ability to unsettle and the unpredictable course of events that take you to the edge of your seat in a truly gripping finale.