Obsessions aka Bezeten - Het gat in de muur (1969) Amsterdam Transitional Noir

Directed by Pim de la Parra. 

Written by Pim de la Parra, Martin Scorsese, Wim Verstappen  and based on a story by Pim de la Parra. Cinematography was by Frans Bromet and Hubertus Hagen. Music was by Bernard Herrmann. 

The film Stars Alexandra Stewart as Marina, Dieter Geissler as Nils Janssen, Tom van Beek as Joseph Edward Petrucci, Donald Jones as Otto Fabian, Elisabeth Versluys as Ingrid, Marijke Boonstra as Stella Olsen.

Its like Rear Window meets Psycho.

One of the curious phenomena of seeing Noir as a Visual Style coupled with a trans-genre Dark Story rather than a Genre is that you will discover that you find yourself judging a film by it's look a lot more than you even think of doing for other films. You will forgive the amateur acting and flaws in the storylines, if your getting enough of that kick. Getting that visual Noir "high." They are optically analogous to looking at a piece of Noir art, say a nocturne painting, a photograph, an illustration, or a frame of graphic novel.

Take Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (above), all you have is the title that Hopper gave the work. But if you tune into and absorb the "noir-ness" of the painting, you'll create various little scenarios, mind movies, if you will, explaining, examining and contextualizing the various figures depicted in a sort of an "Urtext" of Noir. She maybe a prostitute, the guy a john, the counterman doesn't give a shit which he just wants to get off work. The odd man out could be a Bukowski in the making. The same can be said of Hopper's Night Windows (below) which delves even closer to this films theme of peeping on your neighbor.

There's a lot a subpar independent Noir films out there that either look great or have captured a time and place (that serve as basically archival footage of gritty "real life" noir locations that are gone forever). A prime example of a film doing both is The Girls on F Street (1966) it captures a time and place on Bunker Hill and South Main street in downtown Los Angeles in beautiful Black and White but, as a complete narrative film, its a bust. It's more like a Beatnik / Stew bum travelog masterpiece. I used it as an example of what My Gun Is Quick (1957) a Mike Hammer detective story, could have / should have looked like if they wanted to go full Noirsville. Scroll down towards the end of the review on the link above to see some stills. 

Conversely there's a lot of good Studio Noir films out there that could have done a way better job with the Visual Style, but back then nobody knew that Film Noir was going to be a "thing," or that the Visual Style was going to be the hook. They were more into getting product out to the theaters as efficiently as possible, screw Style, especially it it means more camera setups, takes and more time. lol. 

Obsessed aka Possessed or The Hole In The Wall. The film with three titles. I think it should be "Obsessed With The Hole in The Wall." 

The title sequence

One of Vincent van Gogh's self portraits.  A cartoon hand juts out of the frame holding a safety razor to his ear. It's the 60's. The painting falls. It takes the nail and a cone shaped chunk of plaster with it. The chunk of plaster surrounding the nail was deep enough to pull a tiny piece of the next door apartment's wall with it, creating a peephole into the neighbors flop next door. 

We zoom in on the hole. Obsessions is the English language title pops up. An eyeball fills the screen. Cue the bongo drums, we know where we're going. Everyone's eyeball looking through the hole.  

A bedroom. A man and a woman making love in low light. We cut back to a man pressed up against the wall peering through the hole. A voice calls out Nils. It's the man's mother. Nils reluctantly leaves the hole. He's placed an African mask on a new nail over it to conceal the peephole. End of title sequence.

The Story

Mom brings Nils a present of a straw cowboy hat and tells him she's heading for San Paulo to see her second grandchild born. Mom spots a woman's earrings and asks him if he's serious about her. He tells her that he's always serious.

Victoria Naelin as Mrs. Janssen and Dieter Geissler as Nils Janssen

Nils Janssen is just about to graduate from medical school. He's on the down slope coasting towards graduation day. He got a girlfriend Mariana who is an investigative reporter for a newspaper. As soon as Mom is out the door we hear ominous music. Nils walks over to the window and waves good bye to his mother as she gets into her limo. He approaches the African mask on the wall. He swings it aside and  exposes the hole. The mask is a convenient but also a symbolic cover. 

The reason for the ominous music becomes more apparent after Nils watches his neighbor now wearing  a trench coat, and a fedora carrying a naked woman back into the bedroom. It can't be the same girl. The man lays her down on the bed, then covers her with a sheet. Then takes off his hat and coat. 

A phone rings. We cut back to Nils. He leaves the peephole.

Its Mariana, they talk about her job and about their dinner date for later. A soon as he hangs up Nils heads back to the hole. 

Alexandra Stewart as Mariana and Elisabeth Versluys as editor Ingrid

The next glimpse through the hole. We see the neighbor come back to the woman and try and wake her up. He taps and slaps at her face. He walks away. Comes back holding what looks like a box. He puts the box down and picks up the woman by the shoulders and shakes her. Nothing. He then picks her up and takes her out of sight of the hole.

Nils steps away from the peep and just listens. He finally hears his neighbor leave. Nils goes out to the hall and over to the neighbors door and tries his key in the lock. It doesn't quite fit. 

Nils heads back to his flop, gets a jacket heads downstairs to the street. He hops his red Piaggio Vespa SS scooter and splits. He doesn't notice that across the street a fat man and his neighbor and having a conversation by a white van. The fat man passes the neighbor a biscuit size and shaped brown envelope. 

Nils is at a locksmiths shop. Having something made, we suspect, for trying to get in next door,  At any rate he finally buys and pockets a ring of keys and is back at his apartment. 

back at the peephole he now sees the neighbor wearing a T shirt sitting by the girl who is laying covered up in the bed. He is eating food off a plate, drinking milk from a bottle. The girl doesn't seem to be in any apparent danger. 

We cut away to Mariana, the  hot story she is working on is the murder case of an American G.I. A Sergeant Joseph Edward Petrucci who was found dead in Amsterdam four days ago. 

Murder victim

Mariana's editor reminds her of the case she worked on six months ago about a American G.I. who got Stella Olsen, a friend of Mariana's who was a model, hooked on drugs. She got hauled in for possession and did time. Stella got out of jail five days ago. The G.I. was the same Petrucci. The editor thinks the facts are awfully coincidental.  

Mariana and Nils have their date and are back at the apartment and have a night of lovemaking. Later the next morning, Mariana apparently up earlier, shows back up at Nils' place while he is brushing his teeth and peeping through the hole. Nils sees the neighbor laying on the bed and curiously a different raven haired woman getting dressed and ready to leave. 

The neighbor gets up and hands her something. Mariana asks what he thinks he's going he tells her what do you think. Mariana steps up and takes a peep at the hole and sees the neighbor now buttoning his shirt. Mariana steps away and asks.

Mariana: Who's he?

Nils: My neighbor, somebody, lot of strange things happen there.

Mariana: Like what?

Nils: Strange things. 

Mariana: [leaving the apartment by the door on her way to work] Don't waste your time on that. [nodding towards the hole].

Nils watches her cross the street to her car, then he sees the neighbor cross the street behind her. He's left the apartment. Here's his chance. He grabs up the ring of keys and heads down the hall to his neighbor's door. One of the keys on the ring finally opens the door. 

Nils steps slowly and quietly into the apartment. He walks around. Observes. He looks at the wall where the peep hole is and sees that it is practically unnoticeable near the top corner of a painting. 

He sees a small cassette player hits paly and gets a small sample of the jungle bongo music from the lovemaking session he saw during the title sequence. He shuts it off. At the small table next to the bed he opens the draw and sees identical syringe vials of some kind of drug. He open one, takes a whiff and  and then pours some of the contents onto a cotton swab.  He puts the swab into his pocket.

He goes into the bathroom and is startled to see a unconscious naked woman tied to the showerhead standing in a tub partly filled with water. He thought the apartment was empty.

Using his doctors training he pulls back her eyelid. She's alive. He steps up on the rim of the tub and sees that there is a bandage across one of her wrists. He peels it back to see a cut. Attempted suicide? 

Nils shuts off the light and heads back to his apartment. There he finds an empty pill bottle and squeezes the cotton swabs absorbed liquid into the bottle. This he takes to a lab at the medical school. The head of the lab takes a whiff and confirms its probably a narcotic. They'll have it analyzed. 

Later back at the hole Nils sees the neighbor putting on his coat. He then watches at the window. The neighbor meets the fat man on a bridge over the canal. Nils dubs him Baldy. Nils grabs the key and again enters the apartment. The girl has vanished.  

Mariana receives a dispatch from the US Army stating that no man named Joseph Edward Petrucci has served in Germany in the last ten years. So either Stella was lying or was lied too. Mariana heads to the photographer Otto Fabian who worked with Stella to see if he has a line on where she can find her. 

Donald Jones as Otto Fabian

Fabian tells her that she is the second person asking about Stella this week. The first was a fat guy who wanted to buy all his negatives of her. He tells her that he didn't like the guy so he didn't sell them to him. He also mentions that she is still around because she can't leave the country. Mariana gives him her card and asks him to please call if he hears anything about Stella. 

Mariana heads over to Nils apartment. He's watching The Big Sleep on a portable TV that's sitting on the bed. Mariana trying to distract him from the TV tells him that she's working on a very interesting murder case. No reaction. She distracts him in another way. 

They begin to fool around and eventually make love. Fade to black. The next morning at the hole Nils watches his neighbor getting a massage from the raven haired woman. He pays her off with something out of the drug drawer. She gets her overcoat. 

Nils acting the sleuth, gets ready to tail her. He grabs his coat and heads down the stairs. Outside she walks to the corner and flags a cab down. Nils follows  the taxi on his Vespa. 

She gets dropped off at the front of a small 2nd hand store and enters. Nils parks and also enters the shop. Inside he sees no sign of the masseuse, The only person he encounters is an elderly woman, apparently the shop keeper. Perplexed Nils asks if a stuffed owl on top of a high shelf is for sale (a Psycho ref. no doubt), she tells him no. 

Nils leaves. As soon as he's gone, the old woman pulls back a curtain to the rear and reveals the masseuse, who is about to apply another hypodermic, to the still drugged brunette, the very same brunette that Nils left hanging earlier in the bathtub. 

Returning to his place after getting a full rundown on drugs from the lab, Nils finds Mariana taking, what else, a shower (again a Hitchcock / Psycho ref). Nils quietly slips off his shoes and still wearing his raincoat sneaks up a surprises Mariana in the shower. They start to kiss passionately. Suddenly the sound of the water is drowned out by the familiar bongo drums coming from next door. 

That immediately cools Nils'\jets, and a perplexed Mariana watches him run to the African mask hiding the peephole. He he steps up swings the mask out of the way, and watches the neighbor and the brunette making love again. 

Nils obsessed with the peephole

Mariana, slightly miffed, demands to look too. She scolds Nils about his obsessiveness. He leaves the wall for a while, but runs back to it again when the music stops. He sees his neighbor standing naked by the bed, the women looks again unconscious. Nils watches as he puts something away in the drug drawer. It's probably the syringe. 

Done looking through the hole Nils finally takes a shower while Mariana does her nightly beauty rituals and gets into bed. She looks like she is going to go to sleep but decides, while Nils is busy showering, to take a look through the peephole again.  Mariana. now herself, finds that she can't resist a peep through the wall. 

Mariana sees the neighbor shut off the light. and get into bed with the unconscious woman. 

The next day at a conference with the editor of the paper she suggests to Mariana that she thinks Stella killed Petrucci, Mariana replies, no. that she knows Stella and she couldn't kill a fly. 

When Nils wakes up late the next morning. He goes immediately to the hole and finds that Mariana plugged it up with some kind of plaster paste she found in a tube in the bathroom. She must have done it before she left for work, while he was still asleep. He phones her office and they argue about it, telling her that she had no right to. Nils pissed hangs up on her. 

Later that day, while walking back toward his apartment after picking up a pack of smokes, Nil's spots his neighbor drive off in his ' 68 Chevrolet Chevelle station wagon. Nils immediately goes up and unlocks his neighbor's door. He's carrying a hammer and a screwdriver. He sees another drugged woman laying in the bed. 

He quickly pokes out the hole again and goes to examine the new woman. She's very sedated. He hears water splashing. Going to investigate he finds in the bathroom, again naked in a tub filled with water, the first woman he peeped at. This time tied hands behind her back to the water pipe. She has no reaction to Nils. She babbling to herself while she struggles, obviously drugged. 

Nils goes back to the other drugged woman. He gathers her clothing, piles it on the sheet that is covering her and picks her and the sheet up. carrying her down the hall and back to his apartment. 

Nils lays her on his bed, examines her, and checks her heart rate. 

The woman awakens from an unconscious to a conscious state but is still zombie like. She says nothing. She grabs at her clothes and dresses. With Nils help she puts on her shoes and then slips out of the apartment.

Curious now, of course Nils follows. He's surprised when she just walks down the street and enters an address a few doors down. Nils just follows her inside. She still says nothing but moves to a record player and turns it on. WTF? 

The bongo music starts and she immediately becomes animated and very passionate, kissing Nils. The music is the conditioned sexual trigger.  We cut to Mariana getting a phone call from Nils.

 Nils tells her he's sorry and He and Mariana make up. They make a dinner date. The night ends with both of them fast asleep in bed until Nils hears a thump and a curious scraping coming from next door. He looks through the hole and sees his neighbor dragging a large duffle bag. 

The duffel bag

Nils wakes Mariana and asks her for her car keys. He tells her for what. She wants to go too. They play detectives and follow their neighbor in Mariana's 1968 Honda S800 Coupé. The neighbor drives off in the Chevelle wagon. They follow. They watch him pull over and dump the duffel bag in a canal. 

After the neighbor pulls away, Nils dives in to get the bag. He thinks there's a body in it. When they get it up and out of the water, they find strangely when they finally open it that it only contains US Army Sargent uniforms. Now the peephole and the murder case Mariana is working on may be connected.

retrieving the duffel 

The next day, after Nils finally wakes up, Mariana tells him as he's heading for the hole, to don't bother, because his neighbor has already left the apartment. He gets upset that she didn't wake him sooner. He then makes Mariana be a lookout while he sneaks again into the neighbors apartment to see what else he can discover. 

Mariana on the lookout

Checking out the suitcase

A revolver and a wad of cash

He finds a gun and a stack of money. He's almost caught while he's excitedly showing Mariana what he found through the hole, while simultaneously the neighbor comes home and Mariana misses seeing him because she is looking through the hole.  

Nils scoots under the bed to hide. Mariana thinking quickly slips out of her robe and throws on a dress.  She runs down to the Chevelle and wedges a wooden matchstick in the horn button. The Chevelle starts blaring. 

Mariana slipping off her robe to put on her dress to run downstairs

She runs back upstairs and into the apartment, getting inside the door just as the neighbor comes out into the hall to go down the stairs and quiet the Chevelle. Mariana bangs on the wall and yells to Nils to split. He gets back into the apartment just in time to miss the neighbor climbing back up the stairs. 

Hurry!

The two sleuths safe!

It starts to go from just weird to seriously Noirsville after Baldy the fat man (who is involved in the white slave escort service with Nils neighbor) saw Mariana do her little stunt with the car horn. 

The following night while Nils is tailing the masseuse, Blady in his 1954 Mercedes-Benz 180 tries to run him over while he is crossing a street. Nils gets lucky and dives behind the equivalent of a guardrail.

It was a set up, because the masseuse hops in the Mercedes with Baldy and takes off. It is no secret to Baldy who Mariana was shacking up with. 

Noirsville

This is an interesting addition to the Transitional Noir coming out after 1960. In the US the reason was the disintegration of the Motion Picture Production Code and the evolving obscenity laws in during that interval between 1960-69. Those two factors opened the floodgates in the US to the grindhouse exploitation of new creative freedom, and opened the door to more avant-garde un censored European films to be allowed distribution in the U.S. In Europe, this Transitional period to Neo Noir was probably more technical in nature rather than thematic (since there was minimal censorship in most European countries), i.e., B&W to color, experimenting with aspect ratios, but there was also the influence of the French New Wave (creative editing, its own visual style, and narratives exploring more existential themes). 

This film does have the Transitional / Neo Noir color pallet, especially when the neighbors apartment is viewed through the hole in the wall. It's a combo of dingy puke yellows, bone whites, carnal reds, intestine greens, and monkey shit browns, you definitely know that the other side of the hole is in Noirsville. It dovetails in with the foggy and rather bleak diffuse lighting of the temperate, oceanic damp climate of Amsterdam. 

The film is about an addictive, compulsive, obsession that leads in a very convoluted way to oblivion. Dieter Geissler as Nils Janssen is adequate in the part. He just doesn't standout personality wise. He's like your typical dentist. Alexandra Stewart as Marina is more commanding on screen and very believable, however again the rest of the cast are just not fleshed out enough as characters and are reduced to just being plug in bad guys or these zombie like prostitutes in training. It also looks as if the original ending might have been bleaker. There's a sort of tacked on epilogue taking place at a cemetery at the end of the film now.

Its got enough Visual style to give you that Noir fix plus a Bernard Herrmann score to complement the atmosphere. Worth at least a look. Screen caps are from a F-share TV streamer. 6-6.5/10. A new Blu-ray could up the rating to a 6.5 -7 /10.

A Review by Lou (rhymes with wow!) ★★★½ 7

A Dutch mystery thriller written and directed by Surinamese-Dutch filmmaker Pim de la Parra (and co-written by none other than Martin Scorsese as well as scored by Bernard Herrmann!) The movie is very much in the vain of Hitchcock but with a healthier attitude towards nudity and sex. De la Perra basically made a trashy Hitchcock inspired movie some 10 years before Brian De Palma did.

This movie is about Nils who spies on his neighbour through a hole in his wall and observes him having sex with multiple women. There is something not quite right though, as some of the women seem very out of it, almost sedated even. After Nils observes his neighbour injecting a substance into a passed out woman he decides to investigate.

It's a very Americanized movie where everyone speaks English. Which is fine by me since I have always thought of Dutch movies as very akward. That's one of the main reasons I never really bothered watching movies from my own country.

The Dutch title literally translates to Possessed - The Hole in the Wall and it's a very fitting title. The first thing Nils does every morning after he wakes up is walk to the hole and spy on his neighbour.

As an independent movie and made on a low budget it never actually feels cheap. There aren't many stylistic flourishes to it but it feels almost counter-culture in a way.

The voyeuristic aspect isn't very original but the story deviates enough from other thrillers to make it an interesting and rewarding watch.

Kai PerrignonReview by Kai Perrignon ★★★

Sleepy Dutch Rear Window riff by Pim de la Parra about a med student and his girlfriend who spy on his horny neighbour through a peephole in his apartment wall and start to suspect bad shit afoot. The script - co-written by Martin Scorsese - is mechanical and rarely allows for much excitement to peek through each predetermined plot point, but there's a bit of genuine perversion in the mixture of nude catatonic women and banal sex on a twin bed that make up the sexploitation half of the equation. The voyeurism is unadorned, giving the film the suggestion of real fetish rubbing jeans with calculated transgression. Plus I am always weak to low-light 35mm photography, which can make the generic pop, especially if every house is full of ugly textures like this one is. I want to reach out and touch the ugly curtains. I want to feel the grain run down my back as I stare at the busy wallpaper.

by Frank Swietek

The marketing for Pim de la Parra's 1969 would-be thriller focuses on the contributions of Martin Scorsese, who is listed as a co-writer, and legendary composer Bernard Herrmann. In fact, Scorsese's contribution was minimal, and Herrmann's loud dubbed score consists of recycled material and an almost comically crude employment of his characteristically repetitive ostinatos. The film itself is a rip-off of Hitchcock's Rear Window and Psycho, in which a young man (Dieter Geissler) becomes fascinated with unsettling goings-on in the next apartment, which he observes through a peephole hidden by a portrait of Vincent van Gogh. By sheer coincidence, his girlfriend (Alexandra Stewart) is investigating an unsolved murder and the disappearance of a young girl, which might both be related to what he has witnessed, but his obsessive search for the truth only places others in danger. The movie is a shapeless, clumsily edited affair in which scenes seem to be arranged randomly, the dialogue is uniformly flat, the production values are threadbare, and the acting is incredibly wooden. Admittedly, the ending brings a nice twist, but the film's original box office success seems to stem from the fact that it was risqué for the time, featuring nudity and gore. Now it comes across as just a weird cinematic curio with a couple of major names attached. Extras include introductions by de la Parra and Geissler (and interviews with both), a text interview with Scorsese (and a copy of his script notes), and a photo gallery. Not a necessary purchase. (F. Swietek)