The Psychic

A thriller set in Italy. Virginia saw something as a child. Her mother went off a cliff and the girl saw the moment from far away, in her mind. She is grown now. Married to a rich man. One day, driving, another vision comes. What she sees is in fragments. A yellow wall, a lamp, a magazine, a limping man, a red carpet, a mirror, and a body bricked into a wall. She does not know what it is. The images do not fall into an order. Her husband has an old house in Tuscany. Virginia goes there. She knows the room. The wall from the vision is there. She breaks it open. There is a skeleton behind it. From there the film becomes an investigation. The police come and her husband is arrested. The dead woman was his former lover. Virginia does not believe it. To save him she starts looking for every detail in the vision, one by one. A friend helps. Luca is interested in parapsychology. What the narrative is interested in is not murder but order: its idea is that what Virginia saw is not the past but the future, and that she put the pieces in the wrong sequence. That changes the ending entirely. The last scene is the price of that misreading. The structure is a puzzle. The narrative shows every detail at the start and the viewer makes the same mistake Virginia does. Lucio Fulci made this before his horror period. There is little blood here and the tension comes wholly from the construction. The music is at the centre and uses a repeating theme; that theme was later used by another director in one of his films. The images are clean, colourful and wide. Jennifer O'Neill, Gabriele Ferzetti, Marc Porel and Gianni Garko are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes the Italian giallo tradition and thrillers built as puzzles. Who it is not for: anyone expecting bloody horror; the film does not carry Fulci's known hardness and the tempo is slow.