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Despite being a celebrated selection of the Cannes Film Festival, Paul Vecchiali’s 1970 arthouse giallo The Strangler was never released stateside. Thanks to a new 2k restoration by Altered Innocence, the psychosexual thriller finally gets a proper release a half-century later. Not only does The Strangler offer a stylized character portrait centered around a killer, but the restoration finally carves out its earned space in Giallo‘s history.

Emile seems like a nice guy. He’s handsome, loves his dog, and spends time at home crocheting scarves. Appearances are deceiving, of course; Emile uses said scarf to stalk and strangle lonely women whom he deems too depressed to go on living. As the death toll of mercy killings mounts, detective Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) finds himself resorting to unconventional, extreme measures to track the killer. That happens to include the assistance of the beautiful Anna (Eva Simonet), a woman who...

A gorgeously discordant pairing of image and sound depicts the killer of women Émile (Jacques Perrin) as he stalks his prey in the late writer/director Paul Vecchiali’s distinctly autumnal “The Strangler” — or “L’Étrangleur.” He pursues them from a distance, a sinister but jazzy interlude sometimes underscoring his menacing shadow-like presence.

The 1970 French arthouse giallo didn’t receive a release in the United States upon its premiere a half-century ago, despite being celebrated at Cannes. Distributor Altered Innocence brings the winking, melodramatic psychosexual thriller — anchored in the intersection of four strangers’ warring amoral main character syndromes amid Émile’s gendered murder spree — to American audiences this fall. This comes after showing at Austin’s Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival in September. It is restored with the help of Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (Cnc).

Vecchiali died earlier this year at the age...

Paul Vecchiali’s moody, labyrinthine The Strangler suggests the visual style of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop coupled with the psychosexual fervor of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a queer version of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï by way of the story machinations of Claude Chabrol’s The Champagne Murders. Either way, it’s clear that Vecchiali’s interests are cinephilic in nature, and that this 1970 psychological thriller was his self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.

Throughout, Vecchiali is concerned less with plot than with mood and setting, which he largely establishes by showing people moving around colorful apartments and through the bustling streets of Paris. Take Anna (Eva Simonet), who rushes to a television station fearing for her safety after Simon (Julien Guiomar...