Overview: A visitor arrives in a small Italian village looking for a woman. Residents tell him that she committed suicide but there's more to the mystery than they're letting on. Meanwhile, a strange woman walks by the lake.

Blu-ray Verdict: Peter Baldwin (The Ghost, The Weekend Murders) stars as Bernard, a depressed novelist who sets off in search of his old flame Tilde (Virna Lisi, La Reine Margot), a beautiful maid who works at a remote lakeside hotel.

Bernard is warmly greeted by the hotel owner Enrico (Salvo Randone, Fellini's Satyricon) and his daughter Irma (Valentina Cortese, Thieves Highway, The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire), but Tilde has disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

Bernard undertakes an investigation and is soon plunged into a disturbing drama of familial secrets, perversion, madness and murder!

Also known as 'The Lady in the Lake,' it is often seen as a precursor to the Giallo style that would reach it's peak in the early seventies; and I can certainly see why.

However, I would say that the film is closer to a supernatural mystery film than a Giallo and it also shares a lot in common with the popular American film noir style; stemming from it's picture, execution and subject material.

The film is very much of the high quality variety and director Luigi Bazzoni takes time and a lot of care to ensure that the film is haunting and mysterious as possible - which pays dividends as the plot starts to pan out.

The film is directed by Luigi Bazzoni, who go on to make one of the best seventies Giallo's with the excellent The Fifth Cord as well as one of the oddest genre films with Footsteps in 1975.

There's also a writer's credit for Death Laid an Egg writer-director Giulio Questi, so rather unsurprisingly - 'The Possessed' (aka 'The Lady of the Lake') is a rather bizarre film!

It starts off simple enough and the first half of the movie is pretty easy viewing, but then things start to get a bit stranger in the second half and it becomes easy to loose the plot.

It's lucky then that there's more than enough to keep the audience otherwise entertained. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous and the black and white picture allows the director to capture a real macabre and moody atmosphere. Highly recommended for fans of this ilk. Highly! This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.78:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Special Features of:

Brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
Original Italian and English soundtracks, titles and credits
Uncompressed Mono 1.0 PCM audio
Newly translated English subtitles for the Italian soundtrack
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the English soundtrack
New audio commentary by writer and critic Tim Lucas
Richard Dyer on The Possessed - a newly filmed video appreciation by the cultural critic and academic
Cat's Eyes, an interview with the film's makeup artist Giannetto De Rossi
Two Days a Week, an interview with the film's award-winning assistant art director Dante Ferretti
The Legacy of the Bazzoni Brothers, an interview with actor/director Francesco Barilli, a close friend of Luigi and Camillo Bazzoni
Original trailers
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sean Phillips
+ FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Andreas Ehrenreich, Roberto Curti and original reviews