The Bird With The Crystal Plumage

OUT 12 February / CERT 18 / 98 Mins

When it comes to Dario Argento’s movies, I always tend to colour-code them. If Suspiria’s The Red One and Inferno The Blue One, then Crystal Plumage is definitely The White One. Opening with an attempted murder in a clinical art gallery lit like a lightning bolt, Argento’s debut giallo sees all his signatures fully formed — the black gloves, the POV kills, the Freudian perviness, the woodchip acting — all servicing a wickedly twisted (and unusually coherent) murder-mystery. Argento mastered the flamboyant, splashy gore later, but Crystal Plumage is his most Hitchcockian film — the tension’s as taut as piano wire, the visuals shimmer with subliminal imagery and Ennio Morricone’s eerie score tinkles like the devil’s ice-cream van. It’s by far his funniest movie, too — that grotesque, gratuitous cat-eating artist is bafflingly pointless but absolutely priceless.