Personne n'a entendu crier

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.

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.

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.

Elisa (Carmen Sevilla) is a high-class escort who witnesses new neighbor Miguel (Vicente Parra) disposing of the corpse of his wife, whom he's just murdered. Then he figures that she's better off being his accomplice rather than another victim, so he deeply involves her in the crime.

Much more of a drama / thriller than a horror film (although it can get pretty gory), "No One Heard the Scream" is ultimately an interesting look at two flawed but compelling characters, and their evolving relationship. Elisa, in particular, initially reacts to the crime as a normal, decent human would, but then reveals layers to her character: she's not exactly an innocent. And he's not the total creep you might expect him to be.

Full of philosophical musings toward the end as Elisa & Miguel ponder their relationship and their lives, "No One Heard the Scream" doesn't really dish out a lot of thrills, per se, but it can get pretty tense, and features some dark humor that could have made Hitchcock proud: at one point, Elisa & Miguel are traveling, arrive at the scene of an accident, and are asked to transport some victims to the hospital; naturally, they're very nervous when the police ask them to open the trunk!

The gorgeous Ms. Sevilla, and Mr. Parra (star of director Eloy de la Iglesias' breakthrough film, "Cannibal Man"), share good chemistry, and deliver thoroughly engaging performances. They are nicely supported by Antonio Casas, as one of Elisas' primary clients, Maria Asquerino, as Nuria, and Tony Isbert, as Elisas' hunky young "nephew" Toni.

What really sells the film, however, is the brilliant twist ending that the viewer may actually not see coming. It's just the icing on this particular cake, making this a solid Euro cult feature worth seeking out.

Seven out of 10.

I can't deny "No One Heard the Scream" turned out a massive disappointment to me. My expectations for this - supposedly - Spanish Giallo were quite high, but it didn't fulfil any of those, and that was actually also the case for that other exploitation effort "Cannibal Man" from the same writer/director Eloy de la Iglesia. Perhaps the work of this reasonably acclaimed Spanish cult director isn't for me.

The main reason why I really couldn't get into this flick is because I didn't believe ANY of the story's pivotal aspects. I can not see the prudish and uptight Elisa (Carmen Sevilla) as a deluxe escort girl. I do not see a relentless wife killer and cover-up strategist in the nervous and repressed homosexual Miguel (Vincente Parra). I will not accept that police officers do not open car trunks when people are behaving so strangely about it. Most of all, I can't believe for a second that an odd romance develops between an alleged killer and the witness who's reluctantly forced to help him disposing the body. We all heard of Stockholm Syndrome, but this is ridiculous!

"No One Heard the Scream" may look interesting and exciting, but it's a terribly boring. Well, in fact, it becomes boring after half an hour. The first 30 minutes are mainly frustrating. Terribly frustrating because Elisa has more than a dozen of opportunities to alert the police and turn in her neighbor after witnessing how he clumsily attempts to dump a woman's body in the elevator shaft, but she doesn't. When it becomes obvious that she'll not report him to the police, for whatever reason, the film becomes dull and even more implausible. There's an - admittedly unforeseeable - twist at the end that initially comes across as ingenious and clever, but I advise you not to contemplate or analyze it, because it also doesn't make much sense.