[Il Mistero di Oberwald] begins like a horror extravaganza, with Gothic-lettered credits leaping out from a blood-red mountain-scape. Soon Antonioni turns all the notorious vices of video—the soft definition, the shimmer of parallel lines, the tendency of colors to trail—into expressionist virtues. Cocteau's talky period piece [L'Aigle a deux têtes, on which the film is based], about a widowed queen … and the young rebel with whom she falls in love, becomes a playground for a ghostly, ectoplasmic dance. Antonioni washes color in and out to match mood or character, and he deploys video's supreme facility for trick photography to riveting trompe l'oeil effect. The result, instead of apologizing for video, exults in it, and some of the images—the blood-red prelude, a yellow cornfield as biliously beautiful as a van Gogh—remind one that Antonioni can be the cinema's boldest painter. (p. 18)

Harlan Kennedy, "Venice...