Filmed with a deliberate, assured hand that recalls Antonioni in its enigmatic distance, Marina Spada's As the Shadow is both paranoid and meditative. Claudia, a young travel agent, takes a night class in Russian and becomes enamored of her teacher, a Ukrainian named Boris. Trading on her affection for him, Boris asks Claudia to put up his cousin Olga, an intimidatingly beautiful blonde. As Olga disrupts Claudia's banal existence, the two women begin to form a true bond, and when Olga mysteriously disappears, Claudia devotes herself to finding her. The ensuing search through the calmly forbidding streets of Milan is a seductive journey into a minimalist mystery, Spada utilizing space and time to create a tone poem of tense melancholy.