It’s time to review another maze/labyrinth movie ! This one is a standard low budget horror film from Italy called L'occhio nel labirinto or Eye in the Labyrinth.
Eye in the Labyrinth (1972) (IMDB)
Nothing like an Italian film dubbed into English where the voice doesn’t match the person speaking ! This isn’t an old Japanese film where things get really wild when a character speaks but the version I watched was dubbed instead of subtitled and this did change the presentation of the film. That said, when you are tired, not having to read subtitles is a plus.
Let’s start with some education. This is an Italian giallo film, which means yellow in Italian. A giallo film is a genre of Italian film making that features a murder mystery with elements of horror, slasher, and sexploitation mixed in. Typically the murderer is not known until the very end of the film in a big reveal. The genre got it’s name from murder mystery books printed in Italy starting in 1929 that all featured a yellow background color. You can read more about all of this if interested on Wikipedia.
The opening title card states “A labyrinth is constructed to confuse the human mind. It's architecture rich in symmetry, is subordinated to that result. - José Luís Borges”. And that’s the last of the maze/labyrinth references although there is plenty of confusion in the movie which may remind you of solving a maze.
The film starts with a man being chased in what appears to be an underground concrete structure. It seems like this could represent a maze/labyrinth since he is trying to escape. Things do not end well for him. Part of me wanted to say SPOILER before that, but if something happens in the first minutes of a film to set-up the entire premise what are you really spoiling ? OK, on to the main part of the film - a woman ends up trying to find her missing lover, the psychiatrist (ok, ok we did not know his profession at the time - you win) we saw being chased in the first scenes of the film. Because if a person is missing there is one rule movies are famous for and that is DO NOT go to the police. The best thing to do is clearly to start your own investigation, because movies. I can’t tell you how many important investigations my friends and I have started throughout the years. Except we didn’t call them investigations we called them capers. So many stories.
Back to the movie. It is well directed, has good acting and nice camera work in some very nice settings (across Tuscany, Italy) that will make you want to take a vacation. But this is a mystery thriller that never felt tense. I felt bored watching it and that is a problem for a thriller. Say this is on tv and you are watching it and someone says ‘hey we need to leave’, you would not protest at all, just turn off the tv and go never caring what happened to the characters. But also, if nobody bothers you, you probably wouldn’t be annoyed enough to turn the channel either. I give it a boring, but well made 6/10.
Here is the trailer, or you can watch the entire film directly on YouTube with this link !
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