I love this movie so much

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK is very much worth watching. But it takes a lot of patience because it doesn't follow the template we expect for a film like this; I kept watching because it was wonderfully photographed, had a tremendous musical score, and I kept expecting to get really involved with the main character.Unfortunately, my involvement wavered because most of the action took place inside her head (as best I can figure) and as the story progresses she gets crazier and crazier. For that reason Silvia gets relegated to the role of The Unreliable Narrator. And when a film's makers get too involved in questions of What is real? and What is illusion? my mind goes to the question of What time does whatever is playing in Auditorium 2 start and can I sneak it?Silvia, played by Mimsy Farmer, is a work obsessed career girl employed in some sort of chemical lab. The exact nature of her work is never explained, but she's one of those women who never wants to take a day off. Whatever she does obviously pays well: she has an apartment in Rome with a living room big enough to play polo in.Mimsy Farmer is a blonde American actress of the Hope Lange- Vera Miles school who projects practicality and good sense. She made a second career for herself in Italian films like this after parts on this side of the Atlantic dried up. She kept my interest going even when the plot faltered.Silvia has a Dark Secret in her past, and her life gradually begins to unravel. The atmosphere becomes more menacing, but not a lot happens. It's past the one hour mark before the first irrelevant supporting character gets killed off.Finally there's a climactic scene where Silvia is confronted by the phantoms of the past and events seem to come to a resolution.Then (don't worry- I'm not going to give anything away here) director Francesco Barilli seems to crank up a whole new movie in the last few minutes so different in tone (both in theme and execution) that it seems totally unrelated to everything we've seen and heard, even though it does feature the same actors we've been watching.Imagine if THE KING'S SPEECH had ended with Dr. Logue and King George VI wearing fishnet stockings and dancing "The Time Warp" on the steps of Buckingham Palace. This movie goes off the rails even worse than that.And that's why the ending of THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK dropped its rating from an eight to a three.You can see for yourself if you're a Netflix subscriber- it's available streaming now.

The lovely, slender, gap-toothed blonde beauty Mimsy ("More," "Autopsy") Famer gives a splendid, shattering, heart-breaking performance as Sylvia, a shy, passive and very reserved lass who suddenly starts to lose her marbles. Sylvia experiences troubling childhood flashbacks entailing a time she caught her mother doing just what you think with some other guy (she killed her mom and cut the dude up with a knife), sees and talks to an impish, ghostly manifestation of herself as a little girl, sees mommy's reflection in a mirror, and gruesomely offs several folks living in the apartment building she resides in (one woman is boiled alive in her bath tub, a kindly old man gets hacked up with a hatchet, Sylvia later plants said hatchet in her useless boyfriend's back, and so on). Is Sylvia really going murderously around the bend? Or is something more sinister and mysterious afoot here? As one might surmise from the above synopsis, "The Perfume of A Lady in Black" sure ain't your average, straight-down-the-line safe, conventional and predictable humdrum terror-tinged mystery thriller; instead it's an extremely surreal, disorienting, surprise-laden inside out edge-of-your-seat "Repulsion"-style psychological mind-twister flick that in its own deceptively bent and low-key way proves to be one exceptionally powerful and disturbing scarefest. Francesco Barilli's steady, subdued direction potently evokes a pungent, nerve-rattling sense of genuine menace from every objects and places (a mirror, a vase, a gorgeously verdant open field, a music box), upsetting the viewer's equilibrium by showing how the serenity of plain old everyday life can be easily disrupted and completed ripped asunder. Nicola Piovani's eerie, elegant, atmospheric score and Mario Masini's beautifully graceful cinematography (the fluid, stately tracking shots are simply breathtaking) significantly contribute to the film's spooky, strange, nothing-is-what-it-appears-to-be enigmatic and ultra-paranoid mood. The jolting and unexpected stinger of a brutal ending packs one hell of a ferocious punch. Offbeat, oblique and often unsettling, this first-rate shocker gets my highest possible recommendation.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Francesco Barilli 1974) is a beautiful and fascinating film. Like a previous reviewer, it took me 2 projections before I could fully grasp what Barilli had wanted to do and mostly accomplished with this film.The problem comes from the fact that this if often advertised as a Dario Argento-like Giallo, and it's anything but that. While it's easy to see the visual and atmospheric influence this film had on Argento, The Perfume is much closer to an Antonioni film than it is to other Italian scare flicks. Watch it with this approach in mind and you will be literally hypnotized.Kudos to the main actress who delivers a great performance in a role that had no precise definition on paper!

"The Perfume of the Lady in Black" by Francesco Barilli is an extremely stylish and beautifully shot occult horror film that is often regarded as one of the most underrated Italian horror movies ever made.This film influenced the works of Dario Argento-there are themes and set-pieces that would re-appear,virtually unchanged,in Argento's "Deep Red","Suspiria" and "Inferno".The cinematography is simply astounding and the score by Nicola Piovani is genuinely creepy.Mimsy Farmer plays an industrial scientist named Silvia who is troubled by strange hallucinations.These images that seem so real point to a tragic event from her childhood:the suicide of her mother."The Perfume of the Lady in Black" is obviously inspired by both "Don't Look Now" and "Rosemary's Baby",but there are some lashings of grisly violence(the evisceration/cannibalism scene is particularly nasty and gruesome).Overall,this Italian baffling psycho-shocker is a suitably unsettling exercise in psychological horror with incredibly beautiful Mimsy Farmer.A must-see for anyone interested in Italian horror.10 out of 10.