Rent Fear (1954)

Shadows of a Marriage - Fear review by griggs

Secrets don’t just sit quietly in the background — they gnaw away, and that’s really what drives Rossellini’s Fear. The plot sounds like pulp: Ingrid Bergman cheats, gets blackmailed, panics. But the film isn’t interested in the fling itself. It’s a chilly little chamber piece about what guilt does to a marriage, how silence hollows people out more than scandal ever could. Irene’s “fear” isn’t just being found out; it’s realising there’s nothing solid left between her and her husband.

Rossellini films postwar Germany not with street grit but with moody shadows and polished drawing rooms, as if he’s halfway to making a noir without the guns or gangsters. The wider backdrop of a society patching itself back together gives it bite — the cracks in Irene’s home life echoing the cracks outside. It’s blunt, moralistic, sometimes suffocating, and that’s exactly the trap Rossellini sets.

it's not the film that's the problem, it's the dubbing ! - Fear review by pete b

it's not the film that's the problem, it's the dubbing ! hugely disappointing when instead of the original sound the film has been overdubbed into english, which results in the characters lips moving differently to the words, and sounding separate from the scene as they will haver been added in a post-edit in a studio. i do wish cinema paradiso would flag up if a film is overdubbed, then such films could be avoided.