The film’s self-description: “A locked-room mystery with a twist: A slickly successful businessman wakes up next to his dead lover and becomes the chief suspect. His defense lawyer's never lost a case, but can even she help him?”
I loved this film, but there are several requirements for you if you are going to love it. You have to like locked-room mysteries, you have to put up with subtitles unless you speak fluent Italian, you have to love slow-paced European cinema, and you have to accept the fact you aren’t going to understand what’s going on about half the time. Clearly, there were no notes from the studio about “This will confuse people.” Over-explaining is my least favorite part of American cinema; the Italians are not yet guilty of this.
All these things thrill me. The writing is brilliant. My favorite movies are those that are impossible to predict. Although I can’t write a screenplay, I can predict the next line of dialog in most American movies, and have a .500 average of guessing the ending halfway through. In Invisible Witness, I never once successfully predicted the next line, and I didn’t know how it was going to end when there were only 10 minutes left in the movie.
The link above will let you stream the movie with credit to the International Film Showcase, a program that runs at the Orinda Theater, when there is an Orinda Theater. Efi Lubliner, the programmer of the series, has infallibly good taste, as proven by this tour-de-force. Try to watch it in one sitting if you can; otherwise you may be hopelessly lost
Comments