Four Flies on Grey Velvet – Argento's Giallo in 4K

The final piece of the so-called “Animal Trilogy”, Four Flies on Grey Velvet holds a unique position in Dario Argento’s filmography. While The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o' Nine Tails primarily focused on investigative tension, here the director chooses a more unpredictable path, blending the thriller with grotesque moments, eccentric characters, and narrative insights that border on the absurd.

The story follows Roberto, a musician embroiled in a murder that quickly seems to transform into a trap built around his very existence. His investigations lead him through a web of suspicions and lies where nothing is truly as it appears, pushing the narrative towards a surprising conclusion.

A finale that breaks every rule

The work stands out primarily for its irregular character. Some passages even appear bizarre, but it is precisely this elusive nature that contributes to the film's charm. Argento experiments with visionary images, advanced technical solutions for the era, and a finale that combines tragedy and spectacle in a memorable way.

Decades later, what is striking is not so much the mystery as the way Argento stages it. Some ideas openly defy logic, but it is precisely this audacity that transforms the film into an anomalous and irresistible object for fans of Italian giallo.

Shot on analog 35mm at unspecified ASA sensitivity, original image format 2.39:1 (3840 x 2160/24p), HEVC encoding on BD-66 dual layer. Like many Italian productions of the era, 2-perf (perforation) negative, also known as “Techniscope”, was used, with identical width but 50% less height than 4-perf film, and thus half the area on which to impress the footage.

The 4K scan and the subsequent restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna have brought to light the limitations of such filming, an evident grain and the perception of a lower level of definition. Despite rather rich colors and greater precision in light dynamics thanks to HDR-10, transitions with shallow blacks are observed. A relatively unexciting visual, but these are, after all, the limitations of the source material. The Severin edition additionally offers Dolby Vision, but the difference with the CG disc should not be enormous.

DTS-HD Master Audio (16 bit) and Dolby Digital (224 kbps) 2.0 dual mono Italian and English, worthy of listening between dubbing and direct sound, decently emphasizing the soundtrack, although not very dynamic in musical passages, at least notable for dialogue. The Severin disc only features DTS lossless but at 24 bit; here too, there shouldn't be much concretely better.

Includes a disc with the 2K version, which, aside from SDR for video, offers the same audio and extra features: meeting with Luigi Cozzi (32') and with Dario Argento (19').