I Would Like to See It: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh dices its main players into kaleidoscopic fragments, employing a visual style reminiscent of comic paneling to convey action, romance, and suspense through partial images. Its iconic shot of a razor in a black-gloved hand set against the shadows of an empty parking garage. Its cutaways to eyes going wide in horror, to a bloated corpse in the stagnant water of a bathtub, to a figure reflected in a pair of mirrored sunglasses create a visual atmosphere in which the moment is prized above all else. Color palettes change radically from scene to scene, the film leaping from the pale, brightly-lit grays of urban Vienna to the lush and shadowed greenery of its public gardens to the washed-out yellows and rusty reds of the Spanish coast.

Martino’s camera seeks to disorient and isolate as much as it depicts, capturing staggering figures from deep angles so that all we see is billowing fabric and swinging limbs, peering out from among branches to suggest hidden observers, lurking voyeuristically in showers so as to suggest a killer’s approach without showing it. There is a tremendous sense of tension in his elliptical choices around what to show and what to keep occluded, and it’s this sensibility which takes the film’s good-looking salaciousness and turns it into something genuinely unsettling. Like Julie Wardh’s (Edwige Fenech) dreamlike flashbacks to moments in her masochistic sexual history, the way we see the world through Martino’s eyes is designed both to draw us in and to alienate us.

As Julie, Fenech is the archetypal giallo damsel — delicate and melancholic, but tainted by her violent sexual predilections. The men around her seem unable to communicate with or provide for her, and her connection to reality is psychically tenuous. It’s her fear of her own nature that animates the film, helping it past the typical giallo pitfall of misogynistic emotional sterility. The men in Julie’s life want her dead, yes, and they leverage the actions of a viciously misogynist serial killer in order to pursue their goal, but in the end they’re only minor figures in the psychological landscape of Julie’s own self-loathing, incarnations of her death drive playacting her desire to destroy herself. It’s enough to place Martino’s film well above the vast majority of its peers.