This essay reads Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) as one of Dario Argento's most intricate explorations of how violence circulates between victim and aggressor, and how trauma compels characters to reenact the very harm done to them. Through the film's doubling structures, point-of-view reversals, and two ultra-slow-motion sequences, Argento aligns the spectator with both killer and victim, revealing their underlying continuity. Nina's childhood abuse—her forced masculinization, beatings, and confinement in an asylum—forms the traumatic core that radiates outward, shaping her attacks and the film's visual logic. Her final confrontation with Roberto becomes a moment in which she begins to recognize the repetition compulsion driving her: she shoots "without looking…without hate," mechanically reenacting her stepfather's violence even as she articulates, perhaps for the first time, the origins of her rage. Her resigned expression in the slow-motion beheading suggests a character who has finally glimpsed the cycle that has trapped her. Roberto, by contrast, fails to achieve any comparable understanding. Though he has been forced to experience the terror, helplessness, and gendered humiliation that shaped Nina, he responds not with recognition but with the punitive masculinity of Nina's stepfather—"He said I was crazy"—and with the encouragement of the hyper-masculine God(frey). Rather than breaking the cycle, Roberto perpetuates it, aligning himself with the very aggression that produced Nina's violence. Argento's lyrical staging of Nina's death expresses the director's compassion for the victim still inside the killer, even as Roberto remains unable to see her that way. The film thus becomes a study in divergent responses to trauma: one character approaching insight at the moment of death, the other retreating into the consolations of masculine force.
Keesey et al. (2003) studied this question.