Amuck!

"Amuck!" That is, frenetically or figuratively: to go wild, lose control, go mad—is the rather misleading English title of a 1972 thriller whose original title is much more fitting.
Because in the end, there is very little frantic about it, in a story that places Venice in the background and an obsessive pursuit of pleasure in the foreground, told through a morbid eroticism made of visions and flashbacks, often in slow motion.
An eroticism that is sometimes forced, sometimes absurd, but at times convincing, which overshadows the thriller plot that Amadio fortunately clings to.
I say fortunately because, in the end, it works, perhaps not perfectly, but in a satisfactory way, thanks to a slow and morbid narrative (which, yes, occasionally makes it a bit boring) but also thanks to an elegant direction, capable of giving us evocative scenes, and finally to the excellent cinematography by Aldo Giordani, not to mention the performances of the protagonists.
Barbara Bouchet, simply beautiful, is accompanied by an equally beautiful and convincing Rosalba Neri (who, it seems, replaced Edwige Fenech), joined by Farley Granger, who brings with him significant, though distant, experience from Hitchcock’s "Rope" and "Strangers on a Train" and Visconti's "Senso."
Rounding out the cast is Petar Martinovitch in the role of a mentally disturbed factotum, Umberto Raho as a butler, and Nino Figurini as a rather hesitant police inspector.
Greta Franklin (Bouchet) moves to Venice to work in a remote villa with writer Richard Stuart (Granger), who lives there with his wife Eleonora (Neri). Her main, more or less secret, goal is to discover what happened to Sally, the previous secretary and close friend.
Life at the villa soon transforms into a journey into a morbid world where everything is allowed, and which does not spare our protagonist.
Everything flows fairly well, as mentioned, although sometimes Amadio ventures into surreal moments like the quicksand of the Venetian lagoon or in a rather rushed finale.