Il Dottore, a recently promoted police inspector, moves through his city with an unshakeable faith in authority and an appetite for control that borders on fetish. He commits murder—killing his mistress—and then sets out to erase any trace of his involvement. What follows is not just a cover-up, but a deliberate performance: he insinuates himself into the very investigation meant to uncover the truth, planting clues and guiding his subordinate officers toward a sequence of other suspects. By redirecting attention to these individuals—the woman’s gay husband and a student radical leftist—he aims to demonstrate that the fault lies elsewhere, that the system can be steered to exonerate its most powerful agent, and that someone in his position can operate “above suspicion.”
As the detective story unfolds, Il Dottore uses procedural maneuvers to bend the case to his will. He engineers a narrative in which the supposed culprits are drawn into his orbit and then cleared, all while he keeps the real trajectory of events just out of reach for the investigators. This is less a pursuit of justice than a test of his own supremacy: he wants to prove that his authority can weather scrutiny, that power itself can be curated to protect the powerful, and that the line between duty and domination is a matter of perception and control.
One crucial thread in the film is the resistance of the only potential witness who might threaten this calculus. The anarchist Antonio Pace refuses to name Il Dottore as the killer, not out of fear, but to expose what power does when it speaks in whispers and insinuations. Pace’s stance embodies a chilling counterpoint: if a figure of repression can be the subject of the crime itself, then the very architecture of power becomes a maze designed to confound truth. The moment carries a sharp, almost brutal irony, and the film marks it with a line that lingers in the memory of the audience: > "A criminal leading the repression, it is perfect!"
In a controversial turn, Il Dottore engineers a dramatic self-sacrifice of sorts. He eventually confesses to the crime before his superiors, hoping to render the act transparent and to demonstrate that he is willing to bear responsibility rather than allow the system to falter. Yet the response from those in authority is a cold wall of disbelief; they refuse to accept his confession, choosing to maintain the illusion of propriety and order. Faced with that refusal, he recants his admission, a maneuver executed with the tacit approval of the police commissioner. The gesture exposes a brutal dynamic: the machinery of authority can thwart guilt even when it is acknowledged, and the powerful may be protected not by law, but by the very guardians meant to enforce it.
The film then pivots into a dream-like revelation that casts doubt on the entire sequence of events. The interrogation at Il Dottore’s home is revealed to be a dream, a psychodrama that unsettles the boundary between reality and the psyche of a man who regards himself as the apex of control. When he wakes, the commissioner and other colleagues do arrive at his place, but the film withholds the outcome of their confrontation. The ending remains enigmatically unresolved, leaving questions about accountability, justice, and the nature of power to haunt the viewer.
Capped by a final tonal note, the film closes with a reference to Franz Kafka, underscoring its central meditation on power’s paradoxical character. The allegory lingers: power is at once a source of order and a source of suspicion, a structure that can enforce law while simultaneously enabling its own distortions. The narrative invites reflection on how easily authority can deform truth, how the line between inspector and culprit blurs, and how the monuments of control can be toppled not by evidence alone, but by the fragile psychology of those who wield it. The result is not a tidy procedural, but a stark, contemplative portrait of a man who believes himself above the rules—and of a system that may permit him to be so, even as it refuses to admit it.
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