A ★★★ review of The House with Laughing Windows

I originally added this to my watchlist because someone on Bluesky intimated that it had Lovecraftian vibes—I think that's a stretch and I really don't see it at all. There are parallels you can draw if you're really looking for them (to The Dreams in the Witch-House, perhaps, or Pickman's Model, or even The Music of Erich Zann) but they're very tenuous and have more to do with commonalities of general horror tropes. Maybe the Lovecraft parallel is the vaguely racist line of dialogue about the murderers in the movie traveling to Brazil and coming back with a "bestial religion." Really this is a pure giallo, a bloody thriller about the contradictions of modernity, Italy's failure to reconcile its fascist past, and of course a heaping dose of gender. It's a real achievement of photography and scene-setting, full of lush shadows and thoroughly grungy environments. It also has some wonderful performances, ranging from the hapless to the unhinged to the quietly suspect. Where it touches on…