The 10th Victim

The 10th Victim (La decima vittima, 1965) is an Italian-French sci-fi satire you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Elio Petri and starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. The premise: global war has been abolished, replaced by the legalised Big Hunt — a televised game where players rotate between hunter and prey, ten rounds each. Survive all ten and you walk away with a million dollars. Fail and you don't walk away at all.

Mastroianni plays Marcello, a charming, thoroughly worn-out Roman who is this round's designated prey. His hunter is Caroline — Andress, doing it with a smile and a tea-brand film crew in tow — who has her own reasons for keeping the target alive a little longer. The plot unravels predictably and brilliantly: she wants to kill him on camera, and she might also just want him.

Petri built the whole thing in 1965 and already had the template for televised death-as-entertainment, fashion-forward totalitarianism and the media circus around violence — decades before the genre became a genre. The costuming alone is worth the runtime. Sharp, strange and funnier than it has any right to be. Stream The 10th Victim (1965) online on iFILM.