New Year’s Eve, New Murders
You know you’re in a proper giallo when the movie opens with a New Year’s party full of beautiful, unhappy people and you immediately think, “Ah, yes, at least one of you is doomed.” The Fifth Cord wastes no time. Drunks, simmering resentments, unrequited love, a crippled wife, an old flame, and a lonely man who decides to walk home alone through a tunnel at night. It’s like the killer didn’t even have to try.
John Lubbock, nursing heartbreak over Isabel Lancia’s engagement to his friend Edouard Vermont, takes that fateful walk and is promptly attacked by an unseen assailant. He survives, barely, and suddenly everyone who was at that party becomes suspect material. Enter Franco Nero as Andrea Bild, a washed-up alcoholic reporter whose life is in such shambles that “solve a murder spree” almost reads like self-care.
Franco Nero: Disaster With a Press Badge
Andrea Bild is one of the great giallo protagonists because he’s not especially heroic—he’s just marginally less of a mess than everyone else. He wakes up hungover, ignores ringing phones, and stumbles through his job until his job stumbles into him in the form of attempted murder and later, a mounting body count.
He drinks too much, he pushes people too hard, he mistrusts the wrong people, and he’s not above trying to blackmail a teenager and a race driver to get information. And yet, thanks to Nero’s charisma, he’s compulsively watchable. Andrea isn’t a genius; he’s a stubborn, half-broken bloodhound who keeps following the scent even once it leads straight into his own life—his girlfriend Lù, his ex Helene, his boss, his friends, all caught in the orbit of the killings.
If The Fifth Cord were just a character study of a man who can’t put the bottle down even as the world burns around him, it’d already be interesting. The fact that it’s also a murder mystery is almost extra.
A Killer Who Plans Around Tuesdays
The investigation unfolds with that peculiarly giallo blend of logic and absurdity. First John’s tunnel attack, then Sofia Bini—crippled, isolated, and dispatched down a staircase in a nasty “accidental fall” staged by the gloved killer. The link? Those black gloves… and the fact that one glove is missing a finger.
That’s the film’s deliciously morbid countdown mechanism: each new murder scene reveals a glove with one fewer finger, a visual reminder that someone has a quota to fill. Four more victims. Three more. Two more. Somewhere, a killer is working through a very organized to-do list.
Layered on top of this is the weirdly bureaucratic regularity: the murders keep falling on Tuesdays. It’s like Death has a shift schedule. Andrea and the police slowly realize that the original tunnel attack on John doesn’t fit the pattern, opening the door to the film’s best twist: not all violence is part of the same grand plan. Sometimes, in the middle of a carefully plotted serial killing spree, you just get one bonus idiot with a personal grudge.
Suspects, Secrets, and Terrible Decisions
Everybody in this movie is hiding something, which makes the whodunnit angle properly juicy. Dr. Richard Bini has a crippled wife and a suspicious alibi—conveniently vouched for by his friend Edouard. Walter Auer and Giulia Soavi, the young couple who witness John’s attack, are entangled in underage sex games orchestrated by the good doctor and his pals. Giulia’s father turns out to be the guy who attacked John in the tunnel, thinking he was Walter. Isabel ends up dead in her own bathroom; Giulia gets her throat cut by the lake where she’s prostituting herself. Andrea’s own editor dies of a heart attack while fleeing the killer.
It’s a tangle of sex, class, and shame. People cover up crimes to protect reputations, pay off witnesses instead of confessing, and generally behave like the universe’s worst ethics seminar. Andrea, to his credit, eventually realizes he doesn’t have to pick between being a drunk and being a human being, even if he does still make half his progress by lurking in cars and asking uncomfortable questions.
A Giallo Shot Like High Art
What really elevates The Fifth Cord from “solid thriller” to “minor masterpiece” is how it looks. Luigi Bazzoni directs like he’s allergic to flat images, and the result is one of the most visually striking gialli of the 1970s. Stark modern architecture, brutalist tunnels, fractured reflections, and dizzying compositions turn almost every scene into a controlled nightmare.
Staircases become execution platforms. Hallways stretch like veins in a dying city. People are constantly framed behind bars, glass, railings—everyone visually imprisoned by their guilt, their secrets, or just their architecture. Even quiet scenes have a tense geometry; you feel like the camera knows more than the characters, and is patiently waiting for them to catch up or die trying.
It’s a movie where you could mute the sound, leave only the images, and still feel the dread.
Phone Calls, Neck Braces, and Repressed Desire
Like any self-respecting giallo, this one has its share of pseudo-psychological touches: anonymous threatening phone calls that blur the line between nuisance and omen, unexplained voices on the line, and that ever-present neck brace on John Lubbock, the original victim.
The neck brace, in particular, is a wonderfully petty clue. By the end, Andrea discovers from Dr. Bini that John should have had it removed weeks ago. Yet there John is, still wearing it, milking his status as the wounded teacher. Turns out, he never really was just a victim.
The final reveal is both shocking and perversely logical: John Lubbock is the killer. He didn’t love Isabel; he loved Edouard. Killing Isabel was about eliminating the woman who stood between him and the man he couldn’t have—then staging the other murders to make it all look like the work of a deranged maniac (conveniently also the same phantom who “attacked” him in the tunnel). His entire performance as the traumatized survivor was a drag act of the wounded innocent, complete with unnecessary orthopedic accessories.
The script treats his repressed desire not as a punchline, but as one more tragically twisted motive in a world where no one can be honest about what they feel. The film’s dark humor comes less from him being gay and more from how spectacularly his plan unravels once someone notices his fashion sense in medical equipment makes no sense.
A Black Day for Aries, and Everyone Else
For all its twists and murders, The Fifth Cord is surprisingly melancholy. This isn’t a giallo that revels in glam excess; it’s more about people who are already unhappy before the first blow is struck. Helene, Andrea’s ex, is tired of being hurt. Sofia is trapped in her body and her marriage. Isabel is caught between two men, neither of whom really sees her clearly. Giulia and Walter are being exploited by men with too much money and too little conscience. Even the killer is driven not by simple greed, but by loneliness twisted into fury.
The humor, such as it is, comes from how doggedly everyone clings to their illusions right up until those illusions get them killed. Andrea keeps believing he can handle everything with one more drink and one more hunch. The suspects keep believing their secrets are safe. John believes he can rewrite reality with a carefully orchestrated series of corpses and a neck brace. Tuesday keeps rolling around like a cosmic joke.
Final Verdict: A Beautiful, Bitter Spiral
The Fifth Cord is one of those films that sneaks up on you. You come for the giallo trappings—black gloves, twisted motives, glamorous victims—and stay because it’s all rendered with such cold, precise beauty. It’s stylish without being empty, bleak without being joyless. The mystery clicks, the twist lands, and along the way you get some of the best use of modern European landscapes in any thriller of its era.
If you like your murder mysteries soaked in alcohol, framed like art photography, and populated entirely by people who should really talk to a therapist instead of each other, this is a dark little gem. Just remember: if a series of killings starts happening on Tuesdays, maybe don’t leave any children home alone. And if a man keeps wearing a neck brace way longer than he needs to… maybe don’t invite him to any more New Year’s parties.
