Loneliness kills. Argentinian noir master Carlos Hugo Christensen might have been parodying the Gothic noir genre in La trampa (US: The Trap): the lead characters joke about their relationship’s suspenseful plotline and consider attending a movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer (the earlier stars of 1944’s Gaslight), while Christensen’s screenplay explicitly incorporates Hitchcockian themes from Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941). Nowhere near the excellence of those three other films, La trampa is still an entertaining, good-looking Latin American take on romantic suspense in which Zully Moreno portrays an uptight, homely, 25-year-old spinster resigned to her fate as a respectable member of the Female Moral Society (“If I were to have an accident, nobody would care”) until one day she replies to a newspaper ad from a lonely, wealthy novelist looking for a wife. Equipped with her inherited fortune and a new glamorous look, Paulina Figueroa (Moreno) is invited to Hugo Morán’s (George Rigaud) mansion where they begin a love affair only for Paulina to soon sense that something is not quite right; she doesn’t yet know that Hugo, now living under a new identity, was accused of murdering his wife in Paris and now must come up with a jackpot of money to pay off blackmailers. Juana Sujo plays Patricia’s only friend, Agatha Valle, whose peculiar reaction to Hugo lies somewhere between suspicion and envy and whose mini-nervous breakdown is gloriously melodramatic. Christensen and cinematographer Traverso establish a gloomy atmosphere contoured with some fantastic angles, deep focus, and dramatic shadows, especially during the second half and whenever the action shifts to the “woodshed” where Hugo does his writing.