One on Top of the Other (Una sull'altra), directed by Lucio Fulci in 1969, is an erotic thriller steeped in deception, sensuality, and murder—a stylistic precursor to the giallo boom of the 1970s. Set in San Francisco, the film revolves around a respected doctor, George Dumurrier, whose supposedly dead wife reappears in the form of a seductive striptease performer named Monica Weston—leading to a tangled web of intrigue, betrayal, and identity.
The film’s central female figure, played by Marisa Mell, is not one woman, but two—Susan Dumurrier, the sickly and emotionally distant wife, and Monica, the vivacious, overtly sexual doppelgänger. This dual role becomes a thematic battleground for ideas about gender, power, and appearance. The contrast between the two personas is stark and deliberate: Susan is demure, pale, and restrained, while Monica is magnetic, sexually liberated, and fully in control of how she presents herself to the world.
Marisa Mell’s beauty is central to the film—not just in a visual sense, but narratively. Her appearance isn’t static; it’s transformative. The film plays on the idea that a woman’s image can be curated, multiplied, and weaponized. Monica’s beauty is artificial by design—bleached hair, dark eyeliner, sensual attire—crafted to manipulate and mislead. Yet there’s power in that fabrication. She exists in a world where female identity is shaped by how others desire or fear it, and she uses that tension to drive the plot forward.
Gender, in One on Top of the Other, is tied to performance. Monica/Susan is both object and agent—someone whose femininity becomes a site of mystery and control. The film critiques and indulges in the male gaze simultaneously: it lingers on Monica’s body, celebrates her sexuality, but also shows how such visibility becomes dangerous, especially in a world built on suspicion and duplicity.
Fulci’s direction—full of moody lighting, voyeuristic camera angles, and surreal eroticism—turns beauty into an unstable, slippery thing. Monica’s allure destabilizes reality; her very presence challenges what is real, what is fantasy, and what is manipulation. In the end, One on Top of the Other is less about truth than about perception, and how a woman’s beauty can both reveal and disguise far more than the eye can see.
