Double Face

Dir. Riccardo Freda 92 Minutes

Italy

1969

Starring: Klaus Kinski, Christiane Kruger, Gunther Stoll, Annabella Incontrera, Sydney Chaplin, Barbara Nelli, Margaret Lee

​**1/2/***** Despite being a bit of a low-rent giallo, Double Face is strangely effective in bits and spurts, primarily due to a surprisingly low-key Klaus Kinski (playing against type as a figure of sympathy rather than one of manic villainy), a nice, spooky sexual energy from Annabella Incontrera, and a restrained direction from Riccardo Freda. The film opens with a remarkably cheap car accident (so wonderfully clearly a toy train and a toy car crashing into each other) as Kinski's John Alexander brings us back to the events leading up to the accident. John's wife Helen is killed in a car accident of her own, her body burned beyond repair. Swept up in grief, John soon finds a pornographic film showing Liz (Incontrera) making love with a masked woman and he becomes convinced that Helen survived the wreck.  The horror of Double Face comes more from the psychological and circumstantial elements rather than anything particularly overt, and Kinski's calm performance is a bit unsettling when thinking about the reputation of his characters from the past. Incontrera is terrific in her taunts to him, and the film suffers when it attempts to explain the events taking place (especially a wildly expository climax where the characters at the root of the terror explicitly, though concisely, say what they have done and why). Freda is laid back in his handling of these events, going for a slow rhythm that takes its time mirroring John's own absorbing and consideration of his observations, and several moments linger, camera slightly moving, before moving onto the next element. It is a nice shift from some more erratic and heavily montaged giallos, and the entire piece is a surprisingly somber affair. The film does not entirely work on the whole, but there are pieces scattered throughout that makes it intriguing beyond a simple curio. One wonders what would have happened if it resisted a bit more to mystery instead of succumbing to the horror of explanation.  October 19th, 2019