Personne n'a entendu crier

"No One Heard the Scream" has many of the tropes of a mystery, or even giallo, film. However it largely eschews these genres for most of the run-time, creating less a genre film than a twisted drama about two people pushed to the edge of experience.

The protagonist is an expensive mistress for rich men who witnesses her neighbour disposing of his wife's body. The neighbour takes her hostage and the duo go on a trip to the ocean to dump the body in the sea.

Along the way, the movie loses its original thriller-aspect and becomes a drama about two people in a strange situation. The actress, particularly, is a problem, so cold and inert. When the movie makes its predictable, if belated, detour into homoeroticism with the introduction of an unnecessary nephew of hers, it's almost a relief to see something on screen other than hardened, impassive faces.

There is a romance that feels unlikely and forced, and you are forced to make the conclusion that the openly gay Eloy de la Iglesia just wasn't comfortable shooting romance, love or eroticism between men and women.

Perhaps this extended to his casting of the female lead. She looks like someone who was probably a knockout about five years ago. Would men who can afford to keep an expensive mistress use someone her age?

Then there is a conclusion, which is also a little hard to swallow, and smacks of the tawdry plot developments we got from the giallo genre. It seems like the movie is doubling back on itself, forgetting the progress it made as an interesting drama, and saying "See! This was a thriller, after all!"

I don't know if de la Iglesia ever really made genre pictures; even "The Cannibal Man", notorious Video Nasty though it may be, was perhaps equal parts drama. It also featured an unnecessary young male character as a source of homoeroticism.

Perhaps de la Iglesia, who was a superb filmmaker, needed to be encouraged to make dramas and leave behind genre tropes. For the rest of his career, that's what he seemed to do, thankfully.

I recently watched the Spanish giallo 🇪🇸 No One Heard the Scream (1973) on Shudder. The storyline follows a female escort who opens her apartment door and sees her neighbor dropping a woman's body down the elevator shaft. He forces her to be his accomplice, and a unique relationship forms.

This film is directed by Eloy de la Iglesia (El Pico 1 & 2) and stars Carmen Sevilla (Glass Ceiling), Vicente Parra (The Cannibal Man), Maria Asquerino (Dying of Laughter), and Antonio Casas (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).

This is one of those films where unexpected events keep unfolding. It has very creative twists and turns and is well-written. The acting by the two main characters is solid. The background sound effects and overall soundtrack create the perfect atmosphere. The elevator shaft sequence is particularly well done. There's a fun boat scene that could have been executed better but was still entertaining. All the ending scenes at the camp gave me anxiety, especially once some of the characters revealed their true intentions. The film also has a smart conclusion.

In conclusion, No One Heard the Scream is a worthwhile Spanish giallo that I would recommend to fans of the genre. I would score this a 7/10 and recommend seeing it at least once.

Why Savilla didn't immediately call the police is the big flaw in the screenplay. The dialogue is stilted as is often the case with translated conversations. I only made it to the end because of Carmen Sevilla. The music selections were awful. I have to add that the twist ending was a huge surprise and creative.

Before seeing this I was aware of its director, Eloy de la Iglesia, from his more famous film Cannibal Man. I was very impressed with that movie and it is easily one of the best from the infamous video nasty list. No One Heard the Scream was made in the same year as that one and it shares the same lead actor, Vincente Parra. And while this film was not as good as Cannibal Man, it still shows quite clearly that Iglesia is one of the most unheralded Spanish directors. Both films are genre pics with unusually strong acting and underlying themes. They both also share the basic idea of their horrors occurring within apartments, closed off to the rest of the world. No One Heard the Scream goes along a Hitchcockian path, in that we have a woman, Elisa, witnessing a man, Miguel, murdering his wife. The killer catches her and insists that she becomes his accomplice so that she cannot go to the police. The problem is that this innocent starts to develop an attraction for this scheme and soon becomes all too happy to go along with it.

The way that the two central characters interact with one and other is quite interesting. The complex nature of their motivations leads to some unusual scenes, such as the part where Elisa shoves Miguel in a lake and runs him over a couple of times in a speedboat. He is completely at her mercy, yet she neither kills him nor runs away and simply lets him back in the boat. It's a bizarre moment but somehow rings true and tells us more about Elisa than anything else in the movie. In her private life she depends on an older man for money in exchange for sexual favours, while she supports a young stud in an opposite arrangement; Miguel fits in uneasily somewhere in between. There are a few suspenseful moments in the first half, while it's the dynamics between the two central characters that makes up the bulk of the second half. Events finalise in a very surprising, yet very acceptable, twist in the tail ending that neatly ties everything together. All-in-all, another quality product from Eloy de la Iglesia.

This is another film by interesting Spanish director Eloy Inglesias. It might be the least interesting of the four films of his I've seen, but it has the same themes that seem to run through all his work--apartment living, voyeurism, domestic murder, and repressed homosexuality. It also features two of his regular actors Vincent Parra ("Cannibal Man) and Carmen Sevilla ("The Glass Ceiling"). Sevilla plays a high-priced call girl who herself is keeping a younger male lover. She comes out the door of her luxury high-rise apartment one day and witnesses her neighbor (Parra) dropping a body,apparently his wife, down the elevator shaft. This may seem like another knock-off of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (which Inglesias had already "knocked off" in his film "The Glass Ceiling"). But it goes in a different direction when the man kidnaps her at gunpoint and forces her to help him get rid of the body. A strange relationship develops between them.

This movie is pretty illogical as Sevilla's character passes up several opportunities to turn her neighbor in, even before she develops a Stockholm-syndrome-type relationship with him. There's a twist at the end which is pretty ridiculous, but certainly unexpected. It's really this absurdity though that marks this as a kind of Spanish giallo (an "amarillo"?) since it lacks the over-top delerium of most Italian-Spanish gialli, and is a little more of a subdued character study. If it were more logical, it would be much more in the realm of Hitchcock or Claude Chabrol than in the realm of the gialli.

Inglesias also dials back the homoeroticism a little here. Unlike in "Cannibal Man" there is no intimation that his male characters are closeted homosexuals. Sevilla in some ways may perhaps be a kind of female stand-in for the gay director, and he certainly fetishes the two male actors, who frequently appear shirtless while the beautiful Sevilla (to the disappointment of heterosexual males everywhere) does not. This is probably the weakest of Inglesias' films that I've seen, but it's certainly not bad.