"A Quiet Place in the Country (1969) is about an Italian painter who rents a villa that is haunted by the spirit of a young woman killed during WWII. Essentially, that is about it, as far as a plot for this film. Franco Nero plays the stereotypical image of a temperamental artist; arrogant and dismissive of others, his character is not exactly what one would call warm. The first part of the film is somewhat dull. Nero is shacked up with his lover (Vanessa Redgrave) who encourages his painting, although her motives seem to be more financial, his for the artistry. For whatever reason, he becomes obsessed with a run-down Italian villa and moves there. Nero is plagued by dreams about a young girl who lived in the village and was promiscuous with some of the males who still reside there. The film becomes more interesting as Nero tries to unravel the mystery of how the young woman died, who she was involved with -- and it begins to drive him into total madness. I won't give away the very bizarre ending, and I am not sure I could explain it myself! One positive here is the creepy atmosphere the director manages to set -- one can almost feel the spirit of the young woman throughout the villa. There are some very fascinating visuals throughout. All of that said, the plot is at times quite disjointed, full of holes and unanswered questions. Nero is fascinating to watch, and I confess I knew little of him as an actor. Vanessa Redgrave, always one of my favorites, is given little to do here. Her devotion to Nero's character seems to border on the pathological at times, and we get slight glimpses into their bizarre and -- I think -- unhealthy relationship. This is definitely not a film for everyone, but I found it interesting, despite its flaws.
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sdave75963 November 2010
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JasparLamarCrabb3 November 2010Elio Petri's oddity stars Franco Nero as a moody artist, who, on the advice of girlfriend Vanessa Redgrave, moves out to the Italian countryside and takes up residence in a decaying castle. The tranquility is short-lived as Nero goes from moody to insane. The castle may or may not be haunted by a young girl who was killed there during WWII. Some of the locals seem to know more than they're willing to let on. Nero is excellent and he & Vanessa Redgrave have A LOT of chemistry. Petri's strange directorial touches don't always work and there's probably one too many hidden rooms for Nero to discover, but this is a fine and very creepy psychological thriller. Ennio Morricone's one of a kind music score is among his best. Featuring Georges Géret as a guilt-ridden ex-lover of the mystery girl and a very outré cameo by Madeleine Damien.
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dipdatta15 March 2018Not sure if this is intentional - but the movie seems little artistic/weird & sometime disjointed. That's not necessarily bad thing - at least in this case, because it adds to to eeriness of the plot & setup. Nero acted brilliantly as a half crazy painter & other supporting actors too performed well. The end was very interesting & mostly left on imagination of audience to correctly interpret it. Overall, quite enjoyable.
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lazarillo10 July 2010A talented, imaginative painter(Franco Nero)is having trouble finishing any of his paintings (painter's block?). His matron and lover (Vanessa Redgrave) arranges for him to stay at a quiet villa out in the country. Instead of getting any work done there, however, he becomes obsessed with the story of a beautiful and promiscuous 17-year-old girl who was mysteriously killed at the villa during WWII. The older locals (especially the men)are equally obsessed with the girl,and they all end up holding a bizarre séance. But it is only the painter who starts seeing her ghost and eventually solves the mystery. Or does he?
This movie is kind of a combination of a ghost story like "The Sixth Sense" and an artist-as-unreliable-narrator movie like the recent French film "Swimming Pool". It's not really clear whether the ghost exists or whether Nero's character is going crazy (although the latter seems more likely). It is difficult to really compare this movie to a Hollywood-style movie, however. Whereas a Hollywood-style movie would have ratcheted up the suspense and eventually resolved the mystery. This movie starts and ends with pure over-the-top 60's pop psychedelia and only the middle seems to be a really coherent narrative. And this is really more like the more famous 60's Italian film "Blow Up" in that the mystery eventually becomes almost completely irrelevant.
The "Blow Up" comparison is tempting in that both films star Vanessa Redgrave in one of her more sex kitten-ish roles as opposed to one of her later, more serious roles (she did both, kind of like a British Jane Fonda). However,this film has a much more frenetic pacing than "Blow Up" and is really of a piece with talented director Elio Petri's other films like "The Tenth Victim" and "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion". Besides, this is much more Franco Nero's show than Redgrave's. This is an unusual role for Nero. He looks physically different--thinner and with much less muscle tone (especially compared to his earlier appearances in "Django" and "Texas Addio"). His character is very manic and seems half-crazed from the outset, and he has a lot of blackly humorous scenes like when he visits the dead girl's lonely, invalid old mother and just kind of helps himself to all her photographs. The supporting cast is good too including the very pretty Gabrielle Grimaldi as the "ghost" and Rita Calderoni (who later worked a lot with equally crazed if less talented Italian directors Renato Poselli and Paolo Solvay) as the maid at the villa, who always seems to be in bed with her "brother" and at one point gets painted-- literally--by her crazed employer. You may or not like this, but you certainly can't say it isn't interesting. -
HumanoidOfFlesh19 March 2002I tracked this rarely seen Italian horror on Polish TV and I'm really glad that I taped it.This is a truly bizarre study of madness,which reminds me Polanski's "Repulsion"(1965).The main character-a painter brilliantly played by Franco Nero is trying to run away from his strange visions.He visits an old mansion to find peace,quiet and inspiration,but it seems that this place is haunted by the ghost of a young girl.He slowly loses his sanity...This unjustly forgotten and rather disturbing horror film is a cinematic pleasure to watch for fans of bizarre Italian cinema.The characters are really weird,the musical score by Ennio Morricone is unforgettable and there are some genuine moments of insanity and creepiness.Elio Petri created an unique film,which should be seen by everybody(not only by horror fans!).Highly recommended.
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claudio_carvalho23 June 2018In Milan, the prominent painter Leonardo Ferri (Franco Nero) is a disturbed man that lives with his agent Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave). He has sadomasochistic nightmares with Flavia and shows signs of insanity. He asks Flavia to rent a villa in a quiet place in the countryside to produce his paints. Leonardo chooses a derelict villa that belonged to a promiscuous countess that was murdered during the war and Flavia moves back to Milan. Soon Leonardo is haunted by the countess... or should it be madness?
"Un tranquillo posto di campagna", a.k.a. "A Quiet Place in the Countryside", is a film that aged. Watching it for the first time in 2018 shows a dated tiresome and confused horror film and the best chance to see the eternal Vanessa Redgrave, sexy and gorgeous, and her husband Franco Nero in the lead roles. But the screenplay is typical for a movie from the late 60´s. Elio Petri is best known as a great director of political films but his work in horror genre is quite confused and disappointing. My vote is four.
Title (Brazil): "Um Lugar Tranquilo no Campo" ("A Quiet Place in the Countryside") -
asgard-522 March 2009A hypnotic Italian thriller about a very imaginative young painter (Nero). He's popular, energetic, so are his paintings. His matron and lover (Redgrave) is going to do everything to make him do his thing. She's willing to create an environment in which he'd be able to churn out more work that's hot and expensive. He decides he needs a quiet place in the country to live and paint in. But as they find such a place, he gets distracted big time... This film is brilliantly crafted. Full of striking and dynamic visuals created by clever camera-work. Always logical, insane, but never "cheesy", "Quiet Place..." at times reminds of Fulci's "Lucertola con la Pelle di Donna" and Verhoeven's "De Vierde Man". Franco Nero's a dead ringer to Kurt Cobain in this one. He's so great in this role that it's almost as if he isn't acting. Highly recommended to fans of Bunuel, Verhoeven, Argento, etc.
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Attempting to find some inspiration, an artist and his lover takes up residence in a haunted mansion in the middle of the country and becomes obsessed with uncovering the mystery surrounding the legacy of the woman supposedly haunting the area.
Frankly, this was one of the weirdest Italian horror films simply for that very virtue being present. The fact is that this one here is weird rather than scary, which is present in the opening with his hallucinatory visions and freaky experiences including seeing his double entice him towards a house, her double dressed as a nurse pushing him in a wheelchair or their apartment with its trappings of the 'Mod' lifestyle and their relationship in general is just flat-out weird which just halts the film to the ground. That makes it incredibly hard to stay interest in what's going on, and it remains that way for most of the movie as it switches gears extremely late into the running time into a more traditional horror mystery only that has to be built-up and it takes even longer to get going. This is helped out by the insistence of having him go crazy as the main source for the scares which is just wrong as the events used to get him that way, from the crashing furniture and spilled paint-cans to an incredibly suspenseful séance and his interactions with the town's residents leading to some rather unusual moments here. Beyond the concept of trying to find out exactly why he's being haunted there's not a whole lot of actual horror on display here. While the finale does have a lot of demented horror action in the house and the resolution of the story, that's still not enough to make up for this one.
Rated R: Violence, Language, Nudity and sexual content. -
A Quiet Place in the Country is a rarely seen film, and that's probably owing to the fact that sourcing an English language copy is rather difficult. I was lucky enough to find one, and although I'm not going to rave about this film as some others have; it's certainly very interesting and was worth the trouble of tracking it down. The film is likely to divide opinion because it doesn't really follow any logical structure, and mostly relies on style and atmosphere to get its points across. Films like this have to work extra hard to get me to like them as I'm a fan of films that tell a story...and I'd say it just about manages it. The plot focuses on Leonardo Ferri; a tortured artist. He is haunted by strange visions and suffers from nightmares. Because of this, he feels he needs to get away to the countryside. He ends up staying in a country villa; but his tranquillity is soon interrupted when it emerges that the villa is haunted by the ghost of a girl. Leonardo then becomes obsessed by the idea of the haunting, and edges ever closer to losing his mind.
My main reason for wanting to see this film is the fact that it stars the great Franco Nero. It has to be said that this isn't really an actor's film as the focus is more on the visuals; but in spite of that, Nero still manages to impress with a performance that hits all the right notes. Nero leads the film and plays the only character of any sustained significance; but he does receive some decent support from Vanessa Redgrave. The plot is very fragmented in the way that it's structured and often trails off in directions you wouldn't expect. At times it's easier just to forget about what is going on and just watch the film itself without worrying about the plot. Director Elio Petri creates a surreal atmosphere, which compliments the plot nicely and helps to increase the potency of many of the visuals featured. The plot line about the haunting does not begin until half way through the film; although it is the film's only real attempt to tell a story. Even so, the film is a success rated purely on the quality of what we're seeing on screen...although viewers that appreciate a good story may be disappointed. -
azathothpwiggins19 October 2020An artist named Leonardo (Franco Nero) decides to escape the big city life of Milan, and moves to A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY. He and his lover / agent, Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave) locate a beautiful villa in the middle of nowhere. Leonardo moves in and gets right to work on his paintings.
Unfortunately, he discovers that a 17 year old countess died in the villa, and suspects that her ghost is still there. Becoming obsessed with the girl, Leonardo's mind begins to unravel. Meanwhile, a series of near-fatal "accidents" befall Flavia. Is Wanda responsible? This all leads to the big finale, where the true extent of Leonardo's madness is revealed.
This is a rather odd, deceptively creepy film. It's an effective, late 60's art house movie that can be quite disorienting, and is best understood in the context of the period... -
RodrigAndrisan11 June 2016A completely novel role for Franco Nero, no, he is not a cowboy, neither a cop, he's simply an abstract painter, obsessed with sex, strange dreams and kneaded-surreal-erotic visions. The film starts with a succession of favorite paintings of mine too(Francisco Goya - The Nude Maja, etc., many nudes...) Then, Nero(Leonardo Ferri) is skimming along with Vanessa Redgrave(Flavia) some soft porn magazines. Then, Wanda, the beautiful ghost begin to manifest: being jealous on Flavia, she wants her dead. Absolutely normal, it can happen to anyone no, when a ghost falls for you, she does anything to have you, right? We learn later that in fact Wanda had not been machine-gunned from that plane, but was shot by Attilio(Georges Geret) (usually in other films, a very good actor). Finally, we must conclude that Nero-Leonardo Ferri is really crazy. OK, Elio Petri is for me one of the most talented filmmakers ever, he gave us absolute masterpieces like "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion"(1970)(one of the best films ever made), "We Still Kill the Old Way"(1967), "Lulu the Tool"(1971), etc. but with this "A Quiet Place in the Country" he simply failed, is exactly like those hundreds or thousands of giallo(Italian thrillers) made in the 60s and '70s, those with value close to zero.
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Weirdling_Wolf23 January 2014The canny on-screen pairing of Vanessa Redgrave & Franco 'Django' Nero generates some considerable frisson in this taut, atmospheric Italian chiller. This enigmatic, surreal Giallo is an unwarranted sleeper since 'A Quiet Place in the Country' (1968) is a skilfully wrought, perceptively eerie treatise on madness; with exceedingly robust performances from the two uncommonly attractive leads, assured direction by maestro Elio Petri and a marvellously evocative and uneasy score from Ennio Morricone, ensures that watching this Giallo-Gothic is time well spent. 'A Quiet Place in The Country' sits happily alongside 'Repulsion' & 'The House with Laughing Windows' in terms of macabre mood, eye-popping style and deliciously skewed content. Special mention HAS to be made of the wonderfully Godardian, pop-art title sequence, given considerable pep via Morricone's exquisite avaunt-beatnik grooves!
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Bezenby7 August 2017After a demented credit sequence, things calm down a bit by presenting Franco Nero in his pants, tied to a chair, while Vanessa Redgrave surrounds him with electric gadgets, including an underwater television which she places between his legs. Vanessa then murders Franco in the shower. It's a typical artist's day.
And a dream, thankfully. Franco is having trouble completing any picture these days, and Vanessa, as his wife/manager, is getting rather frustrated that he sits around reading porn and being crazy rather than doing anything else. Worse still, he becomes obsessed with a house he spies in the country (in this film, that means that Franco appears and BECKONS HIMSELF into the house, yep, it's one of 'those' films).
Franco loves the house but is rather creeped out by certain rooms near the top, and tells Vanessa that 'there's a ghost in my house' and ghost that wants to kill Vanessa, judging by the things pulling her through the floor and trying to fry her while she's having a shower. This might be the spirit of Wanda, a girl with the fanny of a burst couch judging by the stories the locals tell about her.
I'm describing this like it's a straightforward 'vengeful ghost' film, but that's far from the truth as the first twenty minutes involving Franco's daily routine are utterly brain melting, and serves to make you doubt anything you see for the entire duration of the film. Is there actually a ghost at all? Is there a conspiracy against Franco or is he just mental? To top it all, there's about three different unreliable narrators in this film too.
And on top of that there's the insane direction and the bizarre Morricone soundtrack. We often see things happen about three times in a row from various angles, like Franco appearing to garrotte his wife, but then not doing that at all, or Franco watching himself painting, or frequently imagining himself as Wanda or one of her lovers, or even a guy that gets murdered. Totally off the wall. Morricone's soundtrack is equally mental, going from AMM style improve to tuneless Resident's piano with slide whistle!
This is a stand out film for me. Not a classic, but a good one due to the off-beat direction and the usual solid Nero performance. Aye. -
Eumenides_015 April 2012Leonardo Ferri can't paint. He's the toast of the town thanks to his abstract paintings, which fetch incredible prices. He dates the beautiful Flavia, his manager. A collector loans him a luxurious villa in the countryside to work. Life should be easy for Leonardo, but he's going through a creative crisis and having violent nightmares. He gets worse when, after driving aimlessly through the countryside, he discovers an abandoned villa for sale and becomes obsessed with living in it. If he already showed signs of mental instability from the start, the legend of a young countess who died mysteriously there during World War II, finally erases the last vestiges of sanity.
Cinema has long loved to explore the relationships between art, creativity and madness. A Quiet Place in the Country was released before Black Swan, The Shining, Robert Altman's Images, and on the same year as Ingmar Bergman's The Hour of the Wolf, with which it shares a few similarities: distraught painter living in isolation is haunted by things which may or may not be figments of his imagination. Although Bergman's remarkable incursion into horror has achieved a degree of fame, Elio Petri's movie remains undeservedly obscure; the fact that it so perfectly embodies the formula many of the above-mentioned movies still cling to, should make it essential watching for fans of movies about artists going murderously crazy.
The first thing one notices is Ennio Morricone's dissonant, deliberately ugly score for the movie. It's loud, clangourous, distorted, and interspersed with metallic noises. It's music meant to disturb and irritate. It gnaws at ones' nerves, predating the score John Williams composed for Images in collaboration with Stomu Yamashta, whose random weird sound effects disrupt the traditional harmony of Williams' compositions. In fact the whole movie is cacophonous from start to finish. The first act in Milan is thundering with urban noises: the indistinct humming of people, the ringing of telephones, the screeching of tires. Ironically, when the action moves to the countryside, it remains equally noise: the omnipresent chirping of birds and droning of critters simply replaces man-made sounds. In spite of the title, there's nothing quiet in the movie, whose frenzied sound wonderfully reflects Leonardo's deranged mind.
The dilemma about Leonardo's mental state is that we can never tell whether he's imagining things or whether a ghost is really manipulating him. He's in almost every frame of the movie, meaning the information we get is mediated by his perception. But the way he sees reality is fragmentary, blending the past and present, hallucinations and memories; he imagines fascist soldiers storming the gardens of the villa as he gazes out of a window. Ambiguity builds up until not even the viewer is capable of distinguishing fantasy and reality. It's not unlike the way Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining slowly becomes part of the hotel's history.
Elio Petri, famous for the Oscar-winning political parable Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, had a dynamic career. He arguably directed the first movie to talk about the Mafia, We Still Kill The Old Way; he directed Marcello Mastroianni in science fiction and crime movies; he tackled labour rights in The Working Class Goes to Heaven, and his political satire Todo Modo predicted the assassination of Italian prime-minister Aldo Moro. For this horror movie he got together with an excellent cast and crew: the actor Franco Nero, already a star thanks to the Django movies, Vanessa Redgrave, the legendary screenwriter Tonino Guerra (co-author of many movies with Antonioni, Fellini and Tarkovsky), and the underrated cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, who worked with Dario Argento in Deep Red. Knowing the names associated with this movie helps explain why it's such a fascinating work of cinema: the strong colours are the mark of Kuveiller, who could saturate the frame like few cinematographers. And the strangeness of the story owes a lot to Guerra's favourite themes of memory and perception (could we expect less from the screenwriter of Blowup?). That this movie is unique isn't remarkable; that some of the finest filmmakers of their time got together to make it is our luck.
Nero also shines in his difficult role and portrays Leonardo's insanity always on the edge of exploding into violence. His feverish, paranoid look greatly enhances the mood and grounds the disparate plot around him. For as much as this movie owes to the absurd and the irrational, it's never a deeply alienating experience thanks to Nero's charisma.
A Quiet Place in the Country is a great '60s movie. It drips with sensuality and coolness. Like Blowup, it defines a time and a place. Pop art is much on display throughout the movie, and American pop artist Jim Dine contributed created the paintings used in the finale. Probably shocking for its time because of the sex and violence, it's aged into a very respectable piece of weird cinema that fans of cult movies will want to add to their repertoire. -
drownsoda9024 December 2019"A Quiet Place in the Country" follows a painter in Milan who finds himself drawn to a dilapidated villa. Upon renting the property, which he plans to restore, he learns of a young countess who was killed there during an airstrike in World War II, and comes to believe he is being haunted by her ghost.
This film seems to have an equal share of detractors and champions, and I fall in the latter camp, as I legitimately find it to be an engrossing psychological thriller that sometimes functions equally as strongly as a supernatural horror film. The demarcation between the two is what the film really bases itself upon--is the artist mad, or is there a ghostly nymphet haunting the property? This narrative device is old as time, but director Elio Petri manages to make it feel fresh, mainly due to the blurring that occurs between reality and fantasy.
As the film progresses, we are introduced to a variety of scenarios in which the tormented painter, Leonardo, has encounters and surreal visions that seem to meld with reality, to the point that the two become indistinguishable from one another--and I believe this was Petri's goal given the main theme at work. Even more startling is that the majority of these sequences occur in daylight, and still manage to be ominous and bizarre--the sprawling villa is atmospheric and lends an additional sense of unease. On numerous occasions throughout, I was reminded of the work of Robert Altman, particularly his more surreal endeavors such as "3 Women" or "Images," which have a similar DNA to "A Quiet Place in the Country." Its preoccupation with art and the histories of places also recalls its contemporary, "The House with the Laughing Windows," another film it predates.
"A Quiet Place in the Country" is perhaps most famous for its leading actors, Franco Nero (as the protagonist painter), and his real-life lover, Vanessa Redgrave, playing a gallery curator with whom he is having a love affair. Nero's portrayal of paranoia is solid, and Redgrave, though she mainly spends the film looking pretty or appearing in lingerie or nurse costumes (both in reality and in a variety of visions), handles the more dramatic material expertly. As the film reaches its climax, it leaves the audience with open-ended questions, though it seems to point us in a certain direction, and the final scene is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek jab that feels a bit at odds with the rest of the film.
That being said, "A Quiet Place in the Country" is still a solid exercise in unease that I found genuinely absorbing. It is not a perfect film, but it is a nightmarish meditation on madness and the supernatural that hits all the right notes. As it moves along, it weaves a spell that is truly bewitching. 8/10. -
A mad artist can't separate fantasy from reality and takes us on a 106 minute, sleep-inducing journey through his own illusions, which include a vision of a girl who died twenty years ago in an Italian villa. Cinematic chloroform from what should have been a fascinating film. Had the music not been so frightfully avant-garde, I might have enjoyed this a little more. I got the point that the music reflected his inner turmoil, but it was just a bit too noisy and chaotic for me. Also, his imitation of a three year old who can't keep the same train of though for more than five minutes de-railed my interest in the story. Vanessa Redgrave, especially, and the rest of the cast give fine performances, but the movie just didn't work for me. This film was a real disappointment and I kept thinking what Mario Bava could have done with material like this!
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RanchoTuVu21 February 2017Franco Nero plays a Milan painter whose work is currently quite popular with collectors and commands high prices. His agent, played by Vanessa Redgrave, is also his lover. Thus you have a mix of artistic talent and its value as a monetary commodity that runs like a current through the movie. His obsession with soft-porn magazines reveals other aspects that result in the character of an artist driven by the kinds of internal forces that exert the edgy influences over his art that collectors find irresistible. The idea to find a quiet place in the country in which to produce more art appeals to him, as well as Redgrave, but for apparently entirely different reasons. The place they eventually decide upon is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a beautiful woman who was killed during an air raid in WW2. In a shocking weird seance scene we see or even feel, thanks to the talent of the director and all the other talent involved, her vaguely dangerous ghostly presence. Nero's insanity becomes increasingly clear as he moves psychologically further into the Italian villa with its ghost. On one level the movie is a disturbing look into his soul, but it also an analysis of the interaction of the commercial forces in the market for contemporary art and the troubled artist.
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BandSAboutMovies13 December 2023The 10th Victim. We Still Kill the Old Way. Property Is No Longer a Theft. Todo Modo. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. Elio Petri made movies that challenged viewers and sadly, he died at 53, an age well too young and one that should have left many years to continue pushing cinema.
Based on The Beckoning Fair One" by Oliver Onions - where do you think the soundtrack team got their name? - A Quiet Place In the Country stands between and yet above so many genre. Is it giallo? Gothic horror? An art film? Comic book trash, as The Boston Globe wrote? Can it be all of those?
Leonardo Ferri (Franco Nero) hasn't been able to paint for a long time. His girlfriend Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave) keeps pushing him to get back to painting so she can sell his work at her gallery. She rents him a mansion out in the countryside, but he feels lost. Then he notices an abandoned property and moves in, a place once taken care of by Attilio (Georges Géret). He hires a housekeeper, Egle (Rita Calderoni in her first world, not yet entering the psychosexual world of Renato Polselli's films) and begins to make the place new again.
Yet there are noises everywhere and strange feelings. A shopkeeper tells him that a girl, Wanda (Gabriella Boccardo), died there during World War II, shot by a plane. He keeps seeing a man leave flowers on his property every day. Flavia leaves when the house itself seems to attack her, as a hole opens under her feet and a bookshelf nearly falls on her.
Without her, Leonardo becomes obsessed with Wanda, learning how every man in town was in love with her and every woman hated her. Was she a nymphomanic using everyone? Was she looking for love that she didn't have anywhere else? Was she using everyone or were they using her? He finally tracks down her mother (Madeleine Damien) to Venice where she lives in a small apartment. Telling her that he's a journalist, he takes photos of her back to the house.
The person leaving the flowers ends up being Attillo. He tells her that he never cared that she loved anyone else, that they had a secret room where her mother watched them make love through a mirror, that the only time he ever grew jealous was when he watched her be mounted by a German soldier who he killed. She helped him bury the body on that day, the same one she died in the air strike.
Flavia comes back and learns that Leonardo has given up on everything. Even his attempts at romance are too rough and between an electric current that strikes her and being strangled by unseen fingers during a seance, she knows she can no longer stay. As the guests department, Leonardo follows her, stabbing her before tearing her to pieces with a shovel. He also attacks his maid and her boyfriend, using them as part of his art before his mind goes a series of visions in which soldiers force people to paint on the grounds and Atillo reveals that Wanda survived the air attack and he was the one who killed her. As the police come to arrest him, he realizes that Flavia stands in the crowd with the onlookers.
Months - or years? - later, he is confined to a mental institution. All he does is work, finally being able to paint sexualized artwork, living off pornography and chocolate. The orderly takes his work, telling him he needs even more and delivers them to Flavia, who hides from his window. She remarks that she wishes that she had his life, as it looks so relaxing.
This movie made me cry more than once and sometimes from joy and other times from the abject nature of my sadness. Perhaps also the Ennio Morricone score. It's emotional when a movie works so well, when you realize that this is the only first-time watch that you will ever get. And it strikes a nerve that Franco is looking for someone who was never there, a woman who is perfect because he only sees her in his mind, but every man, even the ones who touched her before, cannot forget her, as her ghost - memories and not supernatural, mind you - will remain burning hot in their memories as they settle for their wives and lives. Is Franco's character any different than them? Is Flavia not attacked at all by the supernatural but perhaps the one who engineered all of this, a non-horror ending that turns this into the giallo? Did anyone die? Did anyone live?