An already intriguing and noirish tale is further enhanced with a most effective storytelling technique such a fresh visual style. This is 1950 but the film looks much more modern. This is Michelangelo Antonioni's first film but already has much of the look we would come to expect and enjoy in later films. It also has Lucia Bose, a strikingly beautiful beauty contest winner aged nineteen and playing twenty-seven, presumably to make her marriage to the rich industrialist not look too terrible. The story is told in such a way that we tumble backwards throughout the first half until we just about appreciate the nature of our wondrous looking ice queen. An unseen but terrible incident at a lift shaft seems to foreshadow all that happens and the seeming extraneous sounds of street cars, motor vehicles and lifts impose themselves upon scenes that would otherwise seem quite innocent. Our protagonists walk the seeming near empty streets of Milan and their relationship with the buildings and the perspective itself is ominous. It is impossible to avoid the word, alienation here and it is true that however familiar an incident of detection or romance might seem, the edge of a building, the curve of a stair or a line of trees inevitably seems to impose itself and alienate the supposed subject of the frame. This is a wonderfully well constructed and beautiful film and Antonioni, given a great opportunity with the presence of the lovely Bose, shows in his very first film just how luminous and desirous he can make a woman, despite our better judgement.