GRADE: A-

“Deep Crimson” is a disturbing but compelling study in depravity based on the lives of Martha Beck and Raymond Martinez Fernandez, dubbed the “Lonely Hearts Killers” for a string of larcenous murders they committed between 1947 and 1949, during which they were believed to have killed as many as 20 women.

In Mexican director Arturo Ripstein’s intense and unsettling “Deep Crimson” the pair is named Coral Fabre and Nicolas Estrella, but they exhibit the same phenomenon as Beck and Fernandez, whose two wounded psyches merged to become one murderous personality.

Ripstein never attempts to explain that phenomenon, but he does explore the killer’s respective back-stories, albeit in compact fashion, so at least there’s some context to the troubling events that follow.

The deftness, and at times brilliance, of Ripstein’s handling is in the telling, as he uses the circumstances of that context not to justify the couple’s actions, but to humanize them, yet only in a way that serves to increase our horror.

That horror and the film's cinematic depth makes watching “Deep Crimson” a disturbing experience, not so much because we’re made to witness the heinous crimes being committed (although one murder is particularly brutal), but because those crimes are rooted in a twisted human love affair that extenuates the results of their obsessions.

It begins with the introduction of Coral, an unhappy, obese single mother of two young children who is intensely lovelorn and overwrought. When Nicolas, a charmer who claims to be of upper-crust Spanish decent, answers her ad in a personals magazine, she is overcome with all manner of intense, pent-up emotion.

Their first date ends in making love before Nicolas, thinking her asleep, steals money from her and slinks off into the night. Yet Coral, aware of what has happened, is undeterred, convinced she has found her true soul-mate.

With children in tow, she tracks the scoundrel to a seedy hotel, but the confrontation that follows involves only her pleas that she be allowed to accompany him, to take care of him and help him with his work, that of swindling lonely women out of their money. To prove her seriousness and devotion, she promptly deposits her children at a nearby orphanage over their pleas they not be left there. Perhaps trying to console them, she claims she is unfit to be a mother.

Soon Coral is posing as Nicolas’ sister in schemes to bilk lonely, vulnerable women. But when one particular mark causes a fit a jealous rage, Coral slips rat poison into the woman’s drink and kills her. So, then, is the die cast, as the lethal lovers submit to their unholy union.

It’s a method of storytelling lacking Hollywood glamour, but that only makes "Deep Crimson" all the more gripping and authentic in its immoral sensibility; the antithesis of the most recent incarnation of the Beck-Fernandez story, 2007’s “Lonely Hearts,” which converts the homely, overweight Beck into the form of the vivacious Salma Heyak!

“Deep Crimson” is not an attempt at a literal depiction of the real-life killers, and license is taken with the story, particularly regarding the state of affairs preceding their arrests. But the changes come mostly from the need to condense the saga so not to make it little more than a series of macabre murders.

As it stands, “Deep Crimson” is a disquieting mixture of character study and murder melodrama, an extremely well-mounted film that succeeds by concentrating its assault as much on the mind as the senses.

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