John deduces that the first murder was pre-recorded and designed to give the killer an alibi. But the killer actually chats with Anna real-time in a chat box, and even responds to her fake name Sara.
Wasn't the killer in the room with them at the time? So if it was pre-recorded how did a live chat happen? Or maybe the killer wasn't in the room with them and I'm just not remembering it correctly.
It wasn't the first murder it was the game where Carlo played.
shareYou made a mistake. It was not the first murder that John realized was pre-recorded, but the first actual card game and second murder--I believe he says "the first card game," in the movie so it is easy to make the mistake of assuming this is referring to the first victim. But the first victim died because they didn't play by the deadline. The only interactive chatting (where, as you mention, the killer responds to the fake screen name) we see is during the first logon, when they take too much time deciding whether to play or not and the girl ends up dead without them playing any poker at all. When it comes time for the second victim, Anna/"Sarah" gets an email or IM saying it is time to play. The next thing we see is the police deciding who will play, no interactive chatting. Carlo (the killer, who NOW has an alibi) is here this time, and volunteers himself to play, pushing himself from the back of the circle of police (having just arrived from wherever he sent the IM from) and sitting down at the computer. He knows nobody wants to take the responsibility so is fairly certain it won't take any convincing that he will play. Having pre-determined the game and pre-recorded the video himself, he is able to fool the police that they are watching a real game and a live video. There is no true interactivity in this particular game, and there needn't be, because he is in complete control. His mere presence in the police station at that time is the alibi he aimed to create.
If such a "plot hole" is one of the reasons for not liking the movie, I've just made the movie that much more enjoyable for you!
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I think what Argento was trying to say was that the guy had some expierience with computers and could pull that sort of thing off....i think.
Didnt enjoy this movie one bit.
This helps, but still doesn't make total sense. Who was Carlo actually playing against in the second murder? I thought the police computer experts had pretty well established that the game couldn't have been rigged, that it had to be legitimate. And if Carlo was deliberately playing poorly against an AI, there wouldn't have been anything for the experts to have traced. Not to mention that if it was by some miracle rigged, this would have contradicted the "risk-taking" psychology that Argento took such pains to establish.
shareI think the "risk" he was getting off on in that scene, the first game, was that he was the culprit, sitting there among all the cops trying to catch him, essentially playing both sides of the game, seeing if it was going to work, if the system he set up was good enough to beat the police tech guys. Maybe the real rush was in watching that captive audience watch his work. Those aspects, all the string pulling, would have been exhilirating to that character. It also functions, as they say in the movie and as others have brought up, as establishing his alibi.
But I don't think it's outside the realm of possibilities that he could write or use a program that would beat him and plug names into the IM. Since he had already killed the girl all he had to do was lose against the computer in a fixed amount of time. I'll have to go back and watch again but was he at police headquarters for the other games? I assume those ones happened live. If it was all rigged he wouldn't have felt the need to kill Remo because he wouldn't have that competetive streak over something predetermined. He was a gambling junkie but he was always stacking the deck in his favor.