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Carlos Saura’s psychological thriller Peppermint Frappé (1967) is a story of obsession from the school of Vertigo (1958). It’s unsurprisingly not as good as its spiritual predecessor — any movie taking after Hitchcock’s masterpiece is foredoomed — but it isn’t by any means a shoddy-quality knockoff. Its style and approach are all their own. The movie is about a middle-aged physician, Julián (José Luis López Vázquez), who becomes fixated on Elena (Geraldine Chaplin, giving the movie’s best performance), the pretty new wife of his old friend Pablo (Alfredo Mayo). That’s partly because she’s simply beautiful, but more because she happens to look a lot like — actually, is identical to — a woman he’d once seen playing the drums in Calanda during a Holy Week ritual while visiting the area. Julián hasn’t stopped thinking about her even though they never once traded a word. 

Elena doesn’t stop herself, for politeness’ sake, from making it clear she thinks of stuffy Julián as an annoyance. One of Peppermint Frappé’s most burn-in-your-brain recurring images is that of Chaplin teasing and laughing at him at moments when he’s trying out vulnerability. Yet her out-of-reachness only makes her more captivating to her pursuer. Julián relieves his mania for her somewhat by remolding his mousy assistant, Ana, who coincidentally is identical to Elena (she’s also played by Chaplin, taking off her blonde Elena wig in her scenes as the character), in her doppelgänger’s exact image. Shy and pliant Ana is also quickly persuaded to become Julián’s lover, and doesn’t voice any issues about his determination to thrust his fantasies about someone else on her. 

Concluding ghoulishly, Peppermint Frappé is invested in how dangerous a thing the objectification of women can be when taken to its most extreme. (Homicidal hatred eventually arises in the movie from an inability to live up to a fantasy image.) The title’s disgusting-looking drink often sipped by Julián winks at our insufferable protagonist’s preference for what’s artificially constructed to suit his tastes more than the real thing. (The movie’s opening is a little on the nose: it finds Julián diligently cutting out the womanly characteristics that most catch his eye while leafing through beauty and fashion magazines.) But more slyly, the film plays intriguingly as an allegory for life under fascism, where conforming to roles predetermined by a ruthless male figure poses far less danger than openly challenging them. (Spain, at the time, was still under Francisco Franco’s control.)

Peppermint Frappé was Saura’s first major critical and commercial success. I didn’t love it; I found it the kind of unfortunately common movie more fun to talk about and consider than watch. The movie is Saura’s homage to the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel (who’s shouted out right as the closing credits begin rolling), but its sense of humor doesn’t have that filmmaker’s ticklish sense of can-he-really-do-this mischief. And for what’s notionally a psychological thriller it’s chronically deprived of any real tension. It’s about as enjoyable as spending an hour and a half with an incel, even if the final images are astutely fucked-up enough to electro-shock some of the loss of interest we’d felt a few scenes earlier.