Deep Crimson: Blood Will Have Blood

Anchored by Garciadiego’s richly detailed script, Deep Crimson announced a return of sorts to Ripstein’s Buñuelian roots, particularly in its dramatic and expansive vision of amour fou. That blindingly irrational devotion—an object of obscure fascination for the surrealists, typically understood as a perversion of romantic ardor—is given new meaning in Ripstein and Garciadiego’s hands as an incarnation of maternal love. This dangerous passion is established immediately by the lonely hearts correspondence that sparks Coral’s encounter with the secretly effeminate lothario Nicolás Estrella (Daniel Giménez Cacho). Their awkward first date reveals the false pretenses that will shape their destiny—she pretends to be thinner and clumsily conceals her children, while he feigns suave machismo and wears a toupee to hide his bald spot. These illusions fall apart in a heartrending early scene in which Coral, shortly after the couple’s first tryst, tearfully abandons her two young children at the gates of an orphanage and declares her sacrifice to be a demonstration of her absolute devotion to Nicolás. At the same time, she threatens to expose his murder of his first wife (who appears in Nicolás’s wedding photos, incarnated by Garciadiego herself). Thus begins the bloodstained alliance that will hurl Deep Crimson dizzily forward.

Today, the full dimensions of the characters’ crazed love can be better appreciated thanks to the restoration of Ripstein’s original version of the film, which was never publicly screened before its premiere in 2023. This director’s cut fell victim to the kinds of demands too often made by producers, distributors, and festivals seeking to reshape a film for capricious reasons—in this case, to reduce the run time and the overall intensity of the movie through crude and harshly censorious trims. When the two versions of Deep Crimson are viewed back-to-back, it becomes clear how much the loss of twenty-three minutes from the original dulls the film’s sharp edges while diminishing its shocking but necessarily violent climax. The removal of key moments that show the lovers seized by fits of fear, jealousy, and regret dilutes the mounting sense of doom that builds steadily across the longer edit. The reduction of the brutality in the last act also compromises the film’s explicitly corporeal intensity, its imbuing of the bodies of the couple and their victims with powerfully expressive and unnerving qualities.

In Deep Crimson, bodies are poetically rendered as sites of violent acts and emotions. Coral and Nicolás are fatefully linked by their deranged perception of their own bodies, which mark them as outcasts: she is tormented by her weight and fetid breath, and he is obsessed with the secret of his prized toupees, which he protects with rabid, almost animal ferocity. As if to underscore the fragility of their self-images, Ripstein introduces both characters by their reflections in dirty, cracked mirrors within the privacy of their small rooms. Their tortured demeanors stand in contrast to those of their three victims, widows whose self-confidence and resolve are immediately apparent in the direct, even defiant ways they speak about their lives and desires. With their methods of killing, the misfit couple seem to make a deliberately macabre mockery of the widows’ outspokenness and social position: Coral and Nicolás spike the drink of a flirtatious lush with rat poison and bludgeon a devout Catholic with her cherished devotional statue, then dress up both corpses as if for a formal occasion.

This murderous pattern implodes when Coral and Nicolás target a youthful, wholesome mother who lives alone with her daughter in their windswept Sonoran home and auto shop. In a scene that was almost completely removed from the film’s theatrical version, Coral offers to perform an abortion on the winsome and charming widow, while saving her from what Coral knows would be a doomed romance with Nicolás. In a furious moment stained by the bloodlust of Lady Macbeth (and evoking the origins of the film’s title in Thomas De Quincey’s influential essay on the Shakespeare play), Coral urges Nicolás to finish off the poor woman with a crooked knife—the only time in the movie that he carries out a killing himself. The theatrical current running throughout Deep Crimson reaches its pinnacle with the murder of the widow’s daughter, also withheld from the film; instead of showing the slaughter directly, Ripstein hides the young victim’s body as Coral drowns her in a partially concealed tub, then holds the child in her arms like a swaddled doll.

This mercy killing epitomizes the intermingling of cruelty and tenderness that shapes the couple’s perverse understanding of love. Despite the moments of jarring comedy as Coral and Nicolás begin to routinize their murderous enterprise early in the film, the tragic tone of Deep Crimson dominates, and finds beautiful expression in key scenes that have been restored in the director’s cut. These previously excised moments notably center on the motif of torrential rainstorms, a Ripstein signature since The Castle of Purity, which is punctuated by a series of unexplained, monsoon-like deluges. In Ripstein’s films, extreme rain often portends the arrival of a larger force that will engulf the characters, the downpour serving as both an emotional intensifier and a flourish of cinematic artifice that recalls other directors who have embraced it as a lavish expressive device: Akira Kurosawa, Budd Boetticher, and Stanley Donen, studio-era masters whom Ripstein seems intent on upstaging. In Deep Crimson, the diluvial rains poetically echo Coral’s gushing tears, the bathtub in which the murder of the last widow’s daughter takes place, and the puddle that serves as the lovers’ grave.

The film ends with an unforgettable image of Coral and Nicolás murdered by the police on a desolate dirt road, dressed in the costumes they wore on their first date: he in his Bogart fedora, she in her flaming-red party dress. This bleak location and the lex talionis of the finale nod to the vital legacy of furiously dead-end, ironically circular, and blisteringly violent road movies, including Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (an avowed favorite of Ripstein’s) and two other true crime–inspired odes to amour fou, Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Deep Crimson’s last shot seems to offer a poignant, bitter closure of this cycle while bidding farewell to that age of cinema when against-all-odds romance was an ardently shared fantasy. The final, blood-soaked image of the lovers brutally discarded but united in death emblematizes Ripstein’s singular vision of a world in which beauty, cruelty, and decay are movingly and forever intertwined.