Back home

Nightmare in Venice

8 votes

A brilliant surgeon and millionaire, married to a beautiful woman, and highly regarded in the society of Venice, wants more from life and searches for new sensations. Adapted from the 1926 novella Dream Story by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler.

Status: Released

Released Date: 1989-09-01

Runtime: 91 mins

Director: Mario Bianchi

Spoken language: Italiano

Genres: Drama

Original title: Nightmare in Venice

Production Companies:

Production Countries: Italy

Cast

Dott. Riccardo Varchi

Gerardo Amato

Tinì Cansino

Adriana Russo

Pier Maria Cecchini

Patrizia Falcone

Renzo Rinaldi

Barbara Giommi

Franco Caracciolo

Reviews

TheQuietSignal

A Nightmare in Venice is a low-budget, late-80s erotic thriller that loosely reconstructs the conceptual spine of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, later adapted by Kubrick into Eyes Wide Shut, but trades psychological ambiguity for explicit criminal conspiracy. Set against the Venice Carnival, the film follows Ricardo, a successful but internally dissatisfied cardiac surgeon who becomes entangled with a prostitute, an old acquaintance, and ultimately a masked organization that operates not as an uncanny social hierarchy but as a literal coercive syndicate. Where Schnitzler and Kubrick allow the ritual space to remain structurally illegible and therefore psychologically destabilizing, this film explains its mechanisms outright: passwords, tasks, punishments, and a concrete scheme to infect a political figure via contaminated blood. The result is a narrative that shifts the masked elite from a metaphysical system of power into a legible, almost procedural criminal enterprise. The film’s most revealing feature, and its central weakness, is precisely this loss of ambiguity. By making the organization’s motives explicit and its methods concrete—down to the forced injection of a virus and the use of blackmail and coercion—the story collapses the eerie, structural dread present in other adaptations into a conventional thriller logic of cause and effect. Instead of suggesting that Ricardo has glimpsed a hidden social order beyond his comprehension, the film frames his ordeal as entrapment by a secretive but ultimately comprehensible network. In doing so, A Nightmare in Venice becomes less about masks as symbols of fluid identity and more about masks as literal disguises for criminal actors, inadvertently demonstrating how the removal of uncertainty transforms an existential nightmare about power and hierarchy into a finite, morally condemnable conspiracy plot.

2026-02-12

Recommendations

3.3

The Grump

2014-09-05

A stubbornly traditional eighty-year-old farmer - whose social attitudes verge on the prehistoric -

Kuro Arirang

1989-07-01

The film depicts the story of four people working in a sewing factory in Guro Industrial Complex in

3.2

Joshua

2002-04-19

When Joshua moves to the outskirts of Auburn, he awakens the curiosity of the sleepy town. They don’

3.9

The Cremator

1969-03-14

In 1930s Prague, a Czech cremator who firmly believes cremation relieves one from earthly suffering

The Small Bachelor

1927-11-06

What must a man do in order to put an end to his bachelorhood? For George Finch, one of nature's whi

2.8

Varg Veum - Buried Dogs

2008-10-15

Racial tension is running high in Bergen after a young black asylum seeker dies at the hands of the

2.9

Under The Greenwood Tree

2005-12-26

Set in a rustic English village in the mid 19th century, Under The Greenwood Tree tells the story of

3.7

Dean Spanley

2008-12-12

Set in Edwardian England where upper lips are always stiff and men from the Colonies are not entirel

3.2

The Grifters

1990-08-08

A small-time conman has his loyalties torn between his estranged mother and his new girlfriend, both

Pani Heléne

1976-12-26

3.6

Like Water for Chocolate

1992-04-16

Tita is passionately in love with Pedro, but her controlling mother forbids her from marrying him. W

2.3

Poison Ivy 2: Lily

1996-04-26

A young and naive college art student becomes obsessed with assuming the identity and personality of

2.4

Poison Ivy: The New Seduction

1997-07-01

A sinister seductress vows to destroy a suburban family.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

2009-11-18

Forks, Washington resident Bella Swan is reeling from the departure of her vampire love, Edward Cull

3.4

I Capture the Castle

2003-05-09

In 1930s England, 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain and her eccentric family struggle to survive in a d

2.6

Iron & Blood: The Legend of Taras Bulba

2009-04-02

Set in the 16th century, this is a story about Ukraine's Cossack warriors and their campaign to defe

3.5

A Christmas Carol

2009-11-04

Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable e

1.5

Nikutai no akuma

1977-10-29

A high school boy with violent impulsive tendencies begins a troubled relationship with an older wom

2.5

The Sound and the Fury

2015-10-23

A look at the trials and tribulations of The Compson siblings, living in the deep south during the e

2.3

Another 9 1/2 Weeks

1997-06-12

Despondent at losing his lover, a man wanders the streets of Paris and has an affair with her kinky