Nestled comfortably in Northern Italy is the industrial town of Ravenna, which is home to many factories and large-scale businesses, all of which take advantage of whatever natural resources they can get from this region, which they feel compelled to exploit as far as they can. The wife of one of the managers is Giuliana (Monica Vitti), a woman who has grown to be quite paranoid after an accident left her with psychological scars, providing her with a wide range of fears that slowly erode at her sanity and cause her to act erratically, especially on the matter of her husband’s factory, which she senses is a malignant entity to the entire town, seeing visions and imagining situations that manifest as reality in her unstable state. She soon encounters Corrado (Richard Harris), a mysterious businessman who arrives from out of town to recruit employees to come and work for him at his factory in Argentina, with one of his sources being Guiliana’s husband, who assists him in leading in the right direction, but ultimately indirectly presents him with an even bigger challenge, to try and understand a woman so seems so detached from reality already. Corrado soon finds himself entranced by Giuliana, whose fragile state of mind conceals a fascinating personality that he endeavours to explore, attempting to decipher her fears and help her overcome them. In turn, she begins to fall for the enigmatic Corrado, whose sensibilities are far more interesting than those of the average Ravennan citizen, all of which are seemingly content with adhering to the principles of a region governed by faceless corporations that take advantage of the land and its inhabitants, without sparing a second thought to the fact that there might be something more underpinning this apparently beneficial industries. Over the course of their short but passionate relationship, Giuliana and Corrado uncover many secrets about the other – she manages to see a world outside of the bleak industrial landscape, while he’s afforded first-hand insights into the mind of one of the only individuals that seem to have untouched by mysteries of the region.

It’s certainly a challenge to find a coherent place to start when talking about Red Desert (Italian: Il deserto rosso), Michelangelo Antonioni’s vaguely surrealist masterpiece, a bleak and harrowing social drama that bears traits of many different genres, being a passionate romance and a nightmarish horror, both of which are employed perfectly as the film quietly transpires into one of the most astonishing, definitively unique works of 1960s cinema. Antonioni was a filmmaker whose style couldn’t always be pinned down, except for the fact that in nearly every film he made, he employed a kind of immense dedication to a few central concepts that he covers extensively throughout the making of the film. Red Desert is one of his most significant works in terms of how the director balances deeply complex ideas derived from different genres and artistic conventions, and integrating them into an unsettling story of solitude and individuality, creating one of the twentieth-century’s most unconventionally terrifying works of fiction, a haunting urban fairytale that is as insightful into its exploration of the human condition as it is artistically-resonant, being a deeply uncompromising bundle of ideas that work together beautifully when amalgamated through the lens of a filmmaker whose assuredness in his craft allows him to command every frame of this film – and as we’ll see subsequently, Antonioni’s approach to filmmaking, whereby he pieces together different visual and thematic fragments, is a major factor behind the unflinching success of this film, and the precise reason why it occupies such a fascinating part of the culture of mid-century Italian cinema, and why this still resonates as one of the most insightful explorations of deeper social and psychological issues, over half a century since its original release, remaining as remarkably powerful and incredibly bizarre as it did decades ago.

Red Desert was made at a challenging time in the history of Italian cinema – occurring after the peak of Italian neo-realism, but still in the period in which it was incredibly popular (even if many of the most notable figures in that movement were stretching out into different forms of visual storytelling), making this a film instantly caught between the wonderful traditions of films driven by authenticity, and a kind of progressive style, where narrative was not necessarily dismissed, but rather developed alongside more unique and innovative concepts. One element that Antonioni does bring forward from some of his earlier work is the concept of exploring the inner depths of the human condition. More than anything else, Red Desert focuses thematically on the interactions between two characters that are not particularly noteworthy in terms of having discernible traits – Guiliana is a troubled wife of an industrialist, Corrado an out-of-towner who visits Ravenna to develop business prospects. The brilliance comes in the way the film weaves their stories together is masterful, and where the true insights are offered. Ultimately, Red Desert is a film that can best be described as pure psychoanalysis distilled into the cinematic form. Throughout the story, Antonioni offers us glimpses into the mind of the main character, demonstrating her deteriorating state, a byproduct of both her accident that left her with post-traumatic stress disorder and the encroaching influence of the industrial town around her, creating a sense of isolation that she’s unable to handle. Red Desert is an interesting film on a psychological level purely because it manages to show the mental divergence someone would experience without exploiting it – we don’t spend this film observing the protagonist at a distance (which is often a trait of similarly-themed films), but rather ensconced in her metaphysical journey, accompanying her as she traverses this terrifying world she simply doesn’t understand, to the point where we begin to question reality ourselves.

The ways in which Antonioni evokes the sense of alienation is quite incredible, especially considering how simply he executes this story. Most of the characterization comes through the unfurnishes performances given by the two leads. Monica Vitti is one of the most magnetic stars of European cinema, with her career consisting of a series of films that see her captivate audiences through her innate tendency to command the screen, presenting us with something in each one of her performances that we have never seen before. Red Desert is centred almost entirely around her, and as one of the director’s muses, he makes sure that his camera captures each intricate expression or subtle movement, which all add depth and nuance to a character that could’ve so easily been underwritten or just purely there to be a vessel through which the story could be told. Vitti is a contradiction of an actress – she’s enigmatic yet grounded firmly within reality, making the role of Guiliana intrinsically her own, and giving her the chance to explore the inner depths of a character that would have otherwise been unremarkable had the actress not brought her signature brand of quietly brooding intensity and extraordinary elegance to the role. Richard Harris is a formidable scene-partner as the mysterious man who inserts himself into Guiliana’s life and causes her to question reality more than she has already. He’s an ordinary businessman who doesn’t seem to harbour any malicious secrets – yet, through his interactions with the main character, Corrado reveals himself to be something of an enigma, a man just as detached from reality as Guiliana. Red Desert is essentially a film about two outsiders finding their metaphysical salvation in the other, and when siphoned through these remarkable performances, the story takes on even more meaning. Vitti is absolutely incredible in the film, but Harris is just as impressive in his role and working together in this psychological two-hander, the actors bring out the very best in each other, and the story as a whole, bolstering it further than many other similarly-themed films.

However, this film’s cultural cache has always been most notable in terms of the visual scope. Antonioni was a director whose work always reflected a sense of balancing both style and substance, and Red Desert is not any exception. The adage of “every frame as a painting” can be perfectly applied to this film, with the director creating one of the most unconventionally stunning films ever produced. Like the works of modernist painters, especially the German Expressionists, Red Desert takes industrial landscapes, with their varying shades of grey and brown, and repurposes them as gorgeous images of urban life. However, this doesn’t suggest that Antonioni is trying to compel us to find the beauty hidden in even the most bleak of landscapes – Red Desert, as the name suggests, is a film that focalizes the underlying dread that is distinct in cityscapes, where the feeling of inescapable anxiety is a trademark of many similar works. The film seems to be borrowing from the Modernist trope of focusing on the individual in the city, and their challenging relationship when they finally descend into the realm of the uncanny, finding themselves trapped in a landscape that they simply do not know how to navigate, and each step bringing them closer to complete mental decay. Antonioni does exceptionally well in evoking these urban anxieties through presenting us with a film that doesn’t only tell us that this is where it’s heading but rather demonstrates through the intersections of broad, almost overwhelming imagery and the meticulous attention paid to the small details that make it so terrifyingly compelling. Just witnessing the pure visual scope of this film is enough to leave a permanent imprint in the mind of the viewer, enough to terrify us more than we’d expect.

There’s a sense of controlled artistic chaos that the director employs here, ever so slightly but with immense accuracy, turning Red Desert into one of the most disquieting works of narrative fiction produced at its time. Throughout the film, the director evokes our innermost fears, and considering many of these ideas of industrial dominance and the influence of faceless corporate entities as governing factors of every part of our lives, it’s not difficult to see why this is a film that resonates with great intensity, decades later. Not only is Red Desert an incredible achievement when it comes to being a narrative achievement, it is just as visually impressive, a nightmarish vision of a city that seems detached from reality, while still being grounded in a kind of familiarity that we all are undoubtedly able to recognize in some way. Antonioni weaves together something truly extraordinary with this film, creating a hopelessly bleak, but strangely achingly beautiful, portrayal of the modern world, using incredible performances from his two leads, a powerful story that both keeps us at a distance through its shockingly complex depiction of reality and piques our curiosity, motivating us to want to explore it further and delve deeper into this bizarre but undeniably compelling version of the world. In no uncertain terms, Red Desert is an astounding achievement, a simple but horrifyingly brilliant caught between different artistic movements, sampling from numerous genres and employing a kind of metaphysical complexity that is simply not glimpsed all that often. There aren’t many films like Red Desert, which is why we should be appreciative that such an inventive film exists to begin with.