This is an entertaining giallo film (i.e., mystery-thriller from Italy) with a clever plot, starring model Jennifer O'Neill as a Virginia, a psychic woman who has visions of a murder that inspire her to uncover a skeleton walled up in her rich husband's summer house, which leads to her husband's arrest. The woman tries to clear her husband by tracking down other clues from her vision, eventually fingering another suspect with a likely motive, but the problem is that the details of her vision do not always conform to the facts of the murder (for example, she saw an old woman killed, but the victim behind the wall was twenty-five at the time of death). Gradually, we realize that the vision was actually a premonition, and another murder is yet to be attempted - as the desperate murderer tries to dispatch Virginia in order to cover his tracks.

By the standards of the giallo genre (which typically emphasizes violent murder, sexism, and gratuitous visuals over plot), THE PSYCHIC is relatively restrained. The film gets off to grim start with its most bloody moment: a prologue wherein Virginia has a psychic vision of her mother committing suicide, her face bashing against the rocks on the way down, ripping off her skin. After this opening (which serves little purpose other than to establish Virginia's psychic ability) the plot fast-forwards a couple decades and kicks into gear with Virginia's visions of the murder. The early scenes are slow as they set up the story, but the film does a good job of building up to a suspenseful final act, which turns into a reasonably intense cat-and-mouse chase between Virginia and her prime suspect, as both try to get their hands on an incriminating clue.

The screenplay works relatively well on a plot level, in terms of laying out the bit and pieces that will tie together eventually, including an alarm clock watch that plays a memorably haunting tune at two important junctures: the first betrays Virginia's whereabouts when she is hiding; the second figures prominently in the finale.

In terms of dialogue and characterization, the script is less adroit. The characters are not delineated in any way beyond their professions (policeman, parapsychologist, etc), and even Virginia is given no distinctive traits beyond her psychic ability. The words the characters speak avoid most of the unfortunate howlers that can occur in Italian productions dubbed into English, but there are occasional lapses, where it takes too long for someone to state something that is already obvious to the audience (when a close-up of a date on a magazine reveals clearly to viewers that it could not have been at the scene of the murder four years ago, several minutes pass before a supporting character bothers to mention this to the two leads, who appear to have overlooked it). And a crucial piece of exposition near the end (explaining who the killer really is, along with his motivation and his connection to the prime suspect) goes by so fast that you will have no more than a hazy idea how (or if) it all adds up.

These weaknesses aside, director Lucio Fulci handles the material well, even if he does over-emphasize things for the sake of viewers who need everything spelled out for them. The montage of images in Virginia's vision is intriguing and appropriately fragmentary - ambiguous enough so that it is not immediately apparent that she is seeing the future rather than the past. But as the images she "previewed" start to come true, the film constantly cuts back to the blurry premonition versions of the same shots, to remind us that - yes, indeed - Virginia did see this before. The effect is further underlined by always preceding the flashback with a zoom-in close-up on O'Neill's eyes. Still, even this all pays off in the end. The very predictability of the recurring images creates a wonderful sense of fatalism near the very end, as if all Virginia's efforts - rather than moving toward solving the crime - have actually been taking her into harm's way. As the final pieces fall into place, there is a delicious sense of suspense over her apparently impending doom. It's not quite Hitchcockian in its brilliance, but it does work quite well on its own level.

As for the performances, they are adequate though unexceptional. O'Neill may not be the most expressive performer, but she is beautiful enough so that it is easy to watch her in the role for an hour-and-a-half, and you even start to feel some sympathy for her as a character (as opposed to a generic female victim) when she is pursued and cornered near the end.

As a director, Lucio Fulci is almost unknown outside gore-hounds who revere him for his splatter zombie films such as THE BEYOND. Those looking for that sort of graphic horror will be extremely disappointed by THE PSYCHIC's more subtle approach, yet the film was one of the late Fulci's favorites. After all due allowances are made for the dubbing and dialogue, the film does work on its own terms; although not as stylish as Dario Argento and Mario Bava's giallo efforts, THE PSYCHIC shows that Fulci could assemble the genre elements of a respectable thriller that used clever (if contrived) plot twists to keep the audience on the edge of their seat (instead of barfing up their popcorn at the sight of blood).

TRIVIA

Although THE PSYCHIC was one of director Lucio Fulci's favorite films, it was not a success when it was released in 1977. The film's box office failure hurt the director's career, and he ended up working in television for a few years, until a producer hired him to direct ZOMBI 2 (known as ZOMBIE in the U.S.), a rip-off of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, which was known as ZOMBI in Italy. That gore-soaked effort revived Fulci's feature film career, and he churned out a series of bloody follow-ups, including HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD.

The term "giallo" derives from mystery-thriller novels in Italy, which were printed on cheap paper that turned yellow when it aged. THE PSYCHIC makes a subtle reference to this: one of the clue's in Virginia's premonition is a cigarette burning in an ashtray - of an unusual brand that is easily identifiable, because its tobacco is wrapped in yellow paper.