Murder, Madness, and Mediocrity
Ulli Lommel’s Olivia (a.k.a. Prozzie, Double Jeopardy, A Taste of Sin—because even the film wasn’t sure what it wanted to be called) is a psychological thriller in the same way a drunk muttering on the subway is “philosophical.” It thinks it’s edgy, even literary—cribbing from Maupassant of all people—but it plays like a cracked soap opera with the pacing of molasses and the moral clarity of a fever dream that forgot the fever.
The pitch isn’t terrible: a girl witnesses her prostitute mother’s murder and grows into a schizophrenic wife-slash-prostitute-slash-avenger, haunted by her mother’s ghost while slicing her way through London. Then she hops continents, reinvents herself in Arizona, and runs smack into Robert Walker Jr. doing his best “wide-eyed American who should’ve stayed home.” A doomed love affair, a killer lurking in the background, psychosis dripping into every frame—it should have worked. But like all Lommel’s “serious” efforts, it staggers instead of struts, lurching between exploitation sleaze and arthouse aspirations without landing either.
Suzanna Love: Drowning in a Role
Suzanna Love—Lommel’s real-life wife and muse—plays Olivia with the kind of intensity usually reserved for staring at wet paint. She has the face of a tragic heroine, the voice of someone reciting lines phonetically, and the tragic luck of being cast in her husband’s films. Love tries, she really does. She switches from fragile to seductive to unhinged in the space of a breath. The problem is, Lommel films her like a man more interested in ownership than storytelling. Every close-up lingers too long, every scene reduces her to object or victim.
Her big breakdowns are delivered in the same register as her love scenes: blank eyes, whispery lines, long pauses meant to read as “mystery” but that land as “did the camera break?” Watching her carry the film is like watching a gymnast asked to do cartwheels in quicksand—you admire the effort, but you know she’s doomed from the start.
Robert Walker Jr.: The Wrong American at the Wrong Time
Enter Robert Walker Jr. as Michael, an engineer flown in from Los Angeles to restore the London Bridge. He looks like a man who got lost on the way to an insurance seminar and wandered onto the set. Walker is supposed to be the romantic anchor, the audience’s inroad into Olivia’s fractured world. Instead, he’s a blank slate in khakis, an American tourist who falls in love because the script said so.
Their affair should burn—this is supposed to be illicit, heated, dangerous. Instead it plays like two mannequins being shoved together at a department store display. There’s more passion in the bridge they keep meeting on. When Walker gets impaled by a toothbrush (yes, you read that right—death by bathroom hygiene), it’s less tragic than absurd. You half expect him to cough up Colgate foam on the way out.
The London Bridge Gambit
The film’s great gimmick is its use of the London Bridge, dismantled stone by stone and reconstructed in Arizona like some giant Lego project. Lommel, with his usual instinct for half-baked metaphor, treats the bridge as a symbol of continuity, trauma carried across oceans. What he actually delivers is the cinematic equivalent of a travel brochure for Lake Havasu.
We get endless shots of the bridge, wide pans and solemn zooms, as if the very sight of it should make us tremble with recognition. Instead, it’s a bridge. People walk on it. Cars drive over it. Olivia has sex under it, kills beside it, and finally dumps a body beneath it. And still—still—the bridge is more compelling than anything happening around it.
The Murder Setpieces: Tame by Any Name
A psychological horror-thriller lives and dies by its shocks. Olivia dies.
The early murder of Olivia’s mother has a sadomasochistic edge that might have been unnerving if Lommel didn’t shoot it like a late-night Cinemax rerun. Olivia’s first kill—a john beaten with a vase—is so limp it feels like an improv exercise gone wrong. By the time Richard, her abusive husband, reappears like a soggy Dracula and gets stuffed into a steamer trunk, the audience is numb.
And then there’s the toothbrush. Cinema has given us knives, chainsaws, ice picks, and candlesticks in conservatories. Lommel, ever the innovator, opts for Oral-B. The image of Michael skewered in his bathroom is meant to shock, but it only makes you wonder if Colgate sponsored the scene.
Lommel the Auteur: Trying Too Hard, Always
Ulli Lommel wanted to be Fassbinder and ended up Ed Wood with better cheekbones. Olivia has the bones of a European art film—themes of trauma, identity, fractured women in a patriarchal world. But Lommel can’t resist the grindhouse. He lingers on the prostitution, the nudity, the sleaze, then cuts back to long silent stares meant to evoke tragedy.
The result is tonal whiplash. One moment you’re in a melodramatic soap opera, the next in a half-hearted slasher, the next in what looks like a tourism ad for Arizona real estate. Lommel is both too sincere and too exploitative, too enamored of his wife’s face and too lazy to build an actual film around it.
Pacing: A Crime Worse Than Murder
If horror thrives on tension, Olivia is criminally negligent. Whole scenes unfold in real time—Olivia walking the bridge, Olivia staring at the river, Olivia staring at nothing. The editing has the urgency of a sedated snail. By the time the finale rolls around, you don’t care if she kills Richard, if Richard kills her, or if the bridge just collapses and takes them all down.
The runtime isn’t long (barely over ninety minutes), but it feels like purgatory. Each scene promises momentum, then withers into inertia. Watching Olivia is like waiting for a bus that never comes, only to find out the bus was canceled in pre-production.
The Feminist Angle That Wasn’t
Some critics, desperate to rescue the film from obscurity, have floated the idea that Olivia is feminist horror. A woman avenging her mother, reclaiming agency, fighting back against abusive men. That might be true if the camera didn’t leer at her body, if the script gave her thoughts beyond “I hear voices” and “I need a man.” Instead, the feminism feels like a smokescreen, a convenient excuse to sell sleaze dressed up as social commentary.
Suzanna Love deserved better. Olivia deserved better. Hell, even the toothbrush deserved better.
Final Word: Schizophrenia on Celluloid
Olivia is a film that doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know what it wants, and doesn’t know how to get there. It’s exploitation hiding under a trench coat of art, constantly flashing one side then the other. It wants to disturb, but it bores. It wants to titillate, but it embarrasses. It wants to be tragic, but it’s just silly.
Some movies are so bad they’re good. Olivia isn’t one of them. It’s so bad it’s exhausting. The real tragedy isn’t Olivia’s fractured mind or doomed romance—it’s that you wasted ninety minutes on something that has the audacity to end with a woman throwing her husband’s corpse into the Colorado River while reminiscing about bedtime fairytales.
If you want Maupassant, read Maupassant. If you want psychological horror, pick literally anything else. If you want to brush your teeth, brush your teeth. Just don’t reach for Olivia.
