Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

A writer lives in a country house, cannot write and humiliates his wife constantly. He throws parties, sleeps with the maid and drinks. When the killings start, suspicion gathers on her. Then the husband's niece arrives and every balance in the house changes. The subject is not the murders but whose favour the domestic tyranny will turn to. The wife is a victim for a long stretch; the niece's arrival shifts her position, and the film presents that not as liberation but as another danger. The form works with the known tools of the Italian thriller: the gloved killer, the razor, the subjective camera. The house and its narrow staircases are the best of it. The black cat in the house is a direct nod to the source. The source is Edgar Allan Poe's story The Black Cat; the adaptation is loose and takes only the kernel. The long, strange title belongs to the fashion for sentence-shaped titles in Italian thrillers of the period and is now treated as a marker of the genre. Edwige Fenech plays the niece, Anita Strindberg the wife and Luigi Pistilli the writer. Sergio Martino directs. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies Italian thrillers. Who it is not for: anyone after a coherent plot; the film tries to untie several knots at once at the end and some of them stay in the air.