Strange Movie

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2014) is an odd, abstract giallo. If you don't know what that is, it is an Italian genre from the 70s-80s of stylized crime films. They feature sexualized violence, lurid colors, and usually knife murderers or stranglers wearing black gloves. They have odd titles, like "Five Flies in a Dead Doll's Eye" (I might have made that up).  Strangely, we watched this after seeing exactly zero gialli.

Business man Klaus Tange comes home from a trip to his Belgian apartment, and finds his wife, Edwige, is gone. He does the obvious thing, and gets drunk, then calls the police, then keeps drinkin. He starts pounding on the neighbors' doors in the middle of the night, pissing everyone off. Then the old lady on the top floor invites him in and shows him a flashback about how her husband disappeared.

One night when they were making love, he heard a noise in the ceiling. When he climbed up to investigate, he found there was a lot of space in the walls, left over from when they cut the house into apartments. He reported back to his wife that he could see the neighbors doing ... things. And he was never seen again.

I guess. It was all kind of vague and elliptical. Another neighbor is a sexpot; she tells him confusing stories and they have sex while covered in broken glass. I had to look away for that. There's a lot of blood in this movie, and our hero wears a bloody shirt when interviewed by the police about his missing wife. "I cut myself."

There are little pieces of plot and narrative in the first half or so, but they get pretty tenuous, and by the end, they are abandoned entirely (SPOILER). What this is really about is mood and style. The apartment is old Belgian art nouveau or de Stijl building, looking very chic and a little ominous. The music is borrowed from old gialli, with a Morricone feel. Some sections are in black and white or silent. And it gets weird.

So if you are interested in seeing wild, weird imagery and/or are interested in an abstract giallo, give this a watch. If you want a plot, not so much.