The House with Laughing Windows, 1976.
Directed by Pupi Avati.
Starring Lino Capolicchio, Francesca Marciano, Gianni Cavina, Bob Tonelli, and Giulio Pizzirani.
SYNOPSIS:
An art restorer is drawn into a murder mystery after he discovers the deceased artist whose work he is restoring had some unorthodox creative methods.
Having entered the world of 4K UHD with their excellent release of Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet earlier in the year – because if you are going to embrace an up-to-date visual technology for your releases, you may as well start with an Argento movie – Shameless Films have once again delved into the HDR pool for The House with Laughing Windows, a title that last saw the light of day from the label on DVD back in 2012.
And what an inspired choice for a UHD release, for not only is the movie an intriguing murder mystery that could be classed as a giallo, albeit one that transcends the limitations of what that word infers, but it is also a visual feast, touching on folk horror thanks to its rural location setting and capturing – both visually and tonally – the dread and fear of a community unable to escape from a history of violence.
Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) is an art restorer commissioned to restore a fresco depicting Saint Sebastian with knives stuck in his torso on the inside wall of a church. The artist was Buono Legnani, something of a local legend as he went mad and committed several murders with the help of his two sisters before dying himself, and so Stefano is met with a lot of negativity from the townsfolk about the painting, especially the priest of the church who doesn’t seem to be particularly enamoured with it.
It turns out Legnani had a trait of painting people as they were dying – hence the murders – and as Stefano uncovers more of the disturbing image on the wall, strange things start to happen within the island community and Stefano comes to the realisation that violence breeds violence, and life can imitate art as much as art imitates life.
Having more in common both structurally and thematically with The Wicker Man than it does with, say, Deep Red or All the Colors of the Dark, The House with Laughing Windows is a haunting, brooding film that takes its time to reveal its secrets, building the mystery without the overt blood or sex that became the staple of gialli during the period. That isn’t to say there isn’t any, because we do get a sizzling romance between Stefano and local teacher Francesca (Francesca Marciano) that becomes integral to the plot, but director Pupi Avati avoids going down the salacious route and relies on the natural chemistry between the two actors to sell the relationship, and gore is kept to a minimum, used sparingly to make its effect more jolting rather than just splashing everything red because that is what most horror movies did at the time.
With no naked flesh and gooey effects played down, The House with Laughing Windows keeps you intrigued by having an antagonist you only see in flashback or hear on a tape recorder, but he has a backstory that we discover the same time as Stefano does, with each action he takes revealing a little more, but unlike Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man, Stefano is not a pious man and his presence does not seem to rile the locals; in fact, they take to him very quickly, which should have told him something but he is just a nice guy trying to do a job.
On DVD The House with Laughing Windows looked great, the gorgeous Italian countryside looking lush and inviting, but on 4K UHD the visuals go up a level. Featuring a new colour grading from a 4K-restored negative, this movie is simply stunning to watch, especially the exterior scenes where the greens of the fields and the blue skies are as close to being there as you could get. Detail level is extremely impressive, especially inside the church and the decrepit old buildings that Stefano finds himself in, and grain level is balanced perfectly throughout, with the Mbps level staying around the 85-100 mark for most of the running time.
With deeper themes of isolation and fascism as an undercurrent – as one local remarks, the last tourists the island had were “German pigs in 1940” – The House with Laughing Windows is a unique movie in the Italian giallo cycle in that it doesn’t have a black-gloved killer or gratuitous nudity, but with so much more going on it takes a couple of viewings to really get the most out of it, a modern equivalent being something like Berberian Sound Studio, another movie that uses giallo as a framework but goes off somewhere else, although that movie is more of a tribute to the style rather than an example of it.
Nevertheless, The House with Laughing Windows is a brilliant example of establishing a tone and then toying with expectations, and, going forwards, this definitive 4K UHD edition is the only way to view it. With this level of quality going into their 4K releases, whatever comes next on their schedule has a lot to live up to.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
