When Dario Argento made The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970, it’s unlikely that he imagined its effect as a template for subsequent giallo films to follow. Nearly 50 years later, Yann Gonzalez wrote a love letter to the pulp genre (and Argento’s film) with queer neo-giallo Knife + Heart.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage certainly wasn’t the first giallo; Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much holds that distinction, drawing from the German crime lit-inspired krimi films that distinguished themselves with shadowed, black-gloved killers wielding unorthodox weapons. Films such as The Green Archer portrayed murder in a fresh, stylized way that paved the road for Italian filmmakers to tread upon down the line, in hand with the “Giallo Mondadori” series of sleazy mystery novels from which the genre gets its name. By the time Bava’s A Bay of Blood came around, the genre had fallen in love with graphic violence and stories that prioritized visual structure over plot (the film is credited as the progenitor of the slasher subgenre today). A myriad of films rest under the Italo-schlock umbrella, from the police procedural (The Black Belly of the Tarantula) to the high Gothic murder mystery (The Red Queen Kills Seven Times). Running through them all are definitive visual and narrative staples that endure in today’s neo-giallo, as displayed in Gonzalez’ latest.

Knife + Heart is, at its core, about desire and posession. Set in 1979, porn producer Anne (Vanessa Paradis) is reeling from a breakup with her lover, editor Lois (Kate Moran). A 10-year relationship proves difficult for Anne to get over, and she stalks Lois in the streets, at discos and even in the workplace (Anne scrawls the note “You have killed me” into the film stock for Lois to discover in the cutting room later on). As production continues on Anne’s latest film “Anal Fury,” her actors begin to turn up dead, one by one. The killer: a black mask-wearing figure, apparently channeling the assailant of Sergio Martino’s Torso. The weapon: a switchblade dildo. As the body count rises, Anne races against the clock to avoid becoming the last victim, but not before cannibalizing elements of the murder investigation as fictional fodder for her own film (and changing the title from “Anal Fury” to “Homocidal”).

The average giallo is endeared to a glimmering blade as its weapon of choice, often wielded by a mysterious figure wearing black leather gloves. Knife + Heart’s iteration of the trope is a wild one: [killer] dispatches his victims with a large black phallus that extends a blade from its tip. The metaphor is an obvious one, but it’s intertwined with the killer’s vanished innocence. In true convoluted Italian thriller fashion, the culprit turns out to be someone unrelated to Anne and her production; a man who, in boyhood, was the victim of a hate crime and left for dead. Guy Favre emerged from his ordeal horribly disfigured, castrated and suffering from amensia until he sees one of Anne’s movies, then it all comes flooding back and he lashes out. The film as a source of torment and a vehicle for revenge recalls Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, complete with a kinky variation on the camera shiv used by deadly loner Mark Lewis. Throughout, sight runs parallel with ownership; to step outside giallo and paraphrase The Silence of the Lambs, “We covet what we see.” It’s a unique offshoot from a genre that generally punishes “seeing,” or witnessing, from The Girl Who Knew Too Much to Deep Red to Seven Notes in Black. Some readings of Knife+Heart interpret the killings as a metaphor for living while queer in the AIDS-emergent era. Regardless of how the themes digest, Gonzalez’s killer is a textbook manifestation of the concept that love hurts, and repression kills.