See no evil
Declaring Dark Glasses to be the best film directed by the legendary Italian horror master Dario Argento in 20 years is almost literally meaningless. First and foremost, he hasn't made anything for the last ten of those years, since 2012's dreadful Dracula 3D threatened to be the final film of his illustrious career. And that came on the backside of ten years of bad features (2004's The Card Player, 2007's Mother of Tears, 2009's Giallo), an even worse made-for-TV movie (2005's Do You Like Hitchcock?) and two adequate episodes of the horror anthology series Masters of Horror. And that gets us back to 2002, which happens to be when Argento wrote the first draft of the Dark Glasses screenplay to serve as his follow-up to 2001's Sleepless, the brightest highlight of the director's patchy post-1987 late period, which has at this point lasted for twice as many years as his early period, and so perhaps deserves a different name.
The points being: it doesn't take a whole lot to be Argento's best film since Sleepless, and also there was no particular reason to assume that he'd be able to hit that target even so, especially having taken ten years off of filmmaking and apparently retired. I can't say what sent him to dust off this script and return to the director's chair; the romantic in me likes to think it was making his acting debut at the age of 80 years young in Gaspar Noé's 2021 film Vortex that recharged him and reminded him how wonderful it is to be on a film set. Whatever it was, this does meet that minimal threshold of quality and it is his best film since Sleepless, while still not really flirting with "great" or "very good" even. It's a solid enough thriller on the rough model of the old gialli where Argento made his name in the '70s, and if he hadn't directed it, it would be the kind of thing where you'd offer muted praise to the person who did for the sturdiness of their Argento pastiche. I am not, for that matter, convinced that we can't call this an Argento pastiche, just because Argento made it himself.
The reason for all of this throat clearing is because, bluntly put, Dark Glasses is less interesting for anything it does or doesn't do in and of itself, than because one of the titans of the genre has decided to use his waning remaining years to run through a fairly straightforward little murder mystery. And I do mean little; this clocks in at a whopping 86 minutes, which is an extremely appropriate running time for something with so few moving parts. In this perfectly watchable murder mystery, we meet a classy call girl, Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), who opens the film by joining a crowd to watch a solar eclipse, without wearing protective sunglasses. This doesn't have any overt payoff, but it ends up as a bit of quiet foreshadowing for a film that will ultimately be at least in part about one of the great themes of Argento's career, how you can't trust your lying eyes, and maybe you'd be better off not believing what you see. For Diana, that becomes an outright necessity, given that she's soon to lose her eyesight altogether - not because of the eclipse. It's because she gets in a terrible car accident while escaping the black-gloved killer who has been murdering high-end prostitutes. In this accident, she also manages to kill a whole family of Chinese immigrants, save for the young boy Chin (Andrea Zhang); in a state of grief and guilt, Diana ends up meeting with Chin, befriending him, and eventually not-at-all-officially adopting him, and the two of them chase after the murderer while trying to stay ahead of the cops who view this whole situation as patently ludicrous. Also, Diana is retraining herself to function as a sightless woman, with the aid of therapist Rita (Asia Argento, giving the most grounded and level-headed - and fully-clothed - performance she's ever given in one of her father's movies), and an extremely good dog who both guides her and protects her and, as needed, rips the living fuck out of people's throats in close-up, allowing us to watch the tendons stretch out and then snap back into a limp pile as they break. Because even if this is a sedate, snoozy, late-late-period Dario Argento film, it's still a Dario Argento film.
And maybe "sedate" and "snoozy" is mean. Even more than that, it's a surprisingly nice Dario Argento film, one built largely around the relationship between Diana and Chin as two damaged people finding a kind of stability in each other's presence, not exactly "comfort", but at least the opportunity to start healing from their losses. It's not precisely a brand-new thing for the director - this has echoes of his films going all the way back to his second feature, 1971's The Cat o' Nine Tails - and it was clearly a direction he was trending in 2002, when this was written; he'd begun to focus as much on the emotional fallout of people surviving the experience of being characters in gialli as much as on the mystery and bloodletting. And in fact, Dark Glasses leaves extremely little doubt that if we're focused on the mystery, we're doing it wrong, revealing the identity of the killer around midway through, in a scene so idly tossed-off and random that you can almost feel Argento's impatience with the mechanics of the formula he's otherwise dutifully re-enacting. I think it's reasonable to call this the most character-driven film he ever made, which isn't saying that it's extremely character-driven; neither Diana nor Chin is particularly striking and distinctive as written, and the actors aren't more than serviceable. But it does give the film a kind of mellow emotionalism, almost I daresay a warmth, as we watch two characters grow accustomed to each other. If this is what Argento's "old man" period is going to result in (assuming he even has an old man period; he's not young and this did come out after a ten-year break, though apparently he's already lining up his next production as I write these words), it's not the most ambitious and exciting place a filmmaker has chosen to take their career as it winds down, but it's an interesting wrinkle on his usual material, one that finds him in an appealing reflective mood.
Anyway, I'm happy that there's something about Dark Glasses that feels distinctive and unexpected, since the movie itself is pretty much just routine, insofar as gialli throwbacks in 2022 are "routine". It's a very plain-looking film, with clean and crisp images that do not show any evidence of the colorful madness of Argento's best, nor even the more basic "spooky atmosphere" of his middle-tier. That 86-minute running time happily means that there's no bloat, but there's not much in the way of using pacing to crank up the suspense, either; individual scenes become queasily thrilling and tense (generally those individual scenes where somebody ends up dead), but this doesn't really carry across the course of the movie. The only real aesthetic personality it has comes from composer Arnaud Rebotini, who provides an outstanding, fearlessly cheesy electronica score to give this all some droning menace (Rebotini came on after Daft Punk, originally announced to do the music, broke up; there's a little bit of "in the style of Daft Punk" going on here, but not enough to feel like the score doesn't have its own thing going on). Music being one of the cornerstones of Argento's entire filmography, it's great to see this return accompanied by one of the best scores any of his films have received since the heart of his golden age. It's not enough to give the film the "oomph" it would need to be more than a perfectly fine and largely unmemorable serial killer thriller, but it's something. Heck, the fact that this is all the way as good as "perfectly fine and largely unmemorable" is pretty much an across-the-board triumph. And if nothing else, it has done the Lord's work by ensuring that, whatever happens, Argento's last film isn't going to be Dracula 3D. It's not much, but I'm glad to have it.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
The points being: it doesn't take a whole lot to be Argento's best film since Sleepless, and also there was no particular reason to assume that he'd be able to hit that target even so, especially having taken ten years off of filmmaking and apparently retired. I can't say what sent him to dust off this script and return to the director's chair; the romantic in me likes to think it was making his acting debut at the age of 80 years young in Gaspar Noé's 2021 film Vortex that recharged him and reminded him how wonderful it is to be on a film set. Whatever it was, this does meet that minimal threshold of quality and it is his best film since Sleepless, while still not really flirting with "great" or "very good" even. It's a solid enough thriller on the rough model of the old gialli where Argento made his name in the '70s, and if he hadn't directed it, it would be the kind of thing where you'd offer muted praise to the person who did for the sturdiness of their Argento pastiche. I am not, for that matter, convinced that we can't call this an Argento pastiche, just because Argento made it himself.
The reason for all of this throat clearing is because, bluntly put, Dark Glasses is less interesting for anything it does or doesn't do in and of itself, than because one of the titans of the genre has decided to use his waning remaining years to run through a fairly straightforward little murder mystery. And I do mean little; this clocks in at a whopping 86 minutes, which is an extremely appropriate running time for something with so few moving parts. In this perfectly watchable murder mystery, we meet a classy call girl, Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), who opens the film by joining a crowd to watch a solar eclipse, without wearing protective sunglasses. This doesn't have any overt payoff, but it ends up as a bit of quiet foreshadowing for a film that will ultimately be at least in part about one of the great themes of Argento's career, how you can't trust your lying eyes, and maybe you'd be better off not believing what you see. For Diana, that becomes an outright necessity, given that she's soon to lose her eyesight altogether - not because of the eclipse. It's because she gets in a terrible car accident while escaping the black-gloved killer who has been murdering high-end prostitutes. In this accident, she also manages to kill a whole family of Chinese immigrants, save for the young boy Chin (Andrea Zhang); in a state of grief and guilt, Diana ends up meeting with Chin, befriending him, and eventually not-at-all-officially adopting him, and the two of them chase after the murderer while trying to stay ahead of the cops who view this whole situation as patently ludicrous. Also, Diana is retraining herself to function as a sightless woman, with the aid of therapist Rita (Asia Argento, giving the most grounded and level-headed - and fully-clothed - performance she's ever given in one of her father's movies), and an extremely good dog who both guides her and protects her and, as needed, rips the living fuck out of people's throats in close-up, allowing us to watch the tendons stretch out and then snap back into a limp pile as they break. Because even if this is a sedate, snoozy, late-late-period Dario Argento film, it's still a Dario Argento film.
And maybe "sedate" and "snoozy" is mean. Even more than that, it's a surprisingly nice Dario Argento film, one built largely around the relationship between Diana and Chin as two damaged people finding a kind of stability in each other's presence, not exactly "comfort", but at least the opportunity to start healing from their losses. It's not precisely a brand-new thing for the director - this has echoes of his films going all the way back to his second feature, 1971's The Cat o' Nine Tails - and it was clearly a direction he was trending in 2002, when this was written; he'd begun to focus as much on the emotional fallout of people surviving the experience of being characters in gialli as much as on the mystery and bloodletting. And in fact, Dark Glasses leaves extremely little doubt that if we're focused on the mystery, we're doing it wrong, revealing the identity of the killer around midway through, in a scene so idly tossed-off and random that you can almost feel Argento's impatience with the mechanics of the formula he's otherwise dutifully re-enacting. I think it's reasonable to call this the most character-driven film he ever made, which isn't saying that it's extremely character-driven; neither Diana nor Chin is particularly striking and distinctive as written, and the actors aren't more than serviceable. But it does give the film a kind of mellow emotionalism, almost I daresay a warmth, as we watch two characters grow accustomed to each other. If this is what Argento's "old man" period is going to result in (assuming he even has an old man period; he's not young and this did come out after a ten-year break, though apparently he's already lining up his next production as I write these words), it's not the most ambitious and exciting place a filmmaker has chosen to take their career as it winds down, but it's an interesting wrinkle on his usual material, one that finds him in an appealing reflective mood.
Anyway, I'm happy that there's something about Dark Glasses that feels distinctive and unexpected, since the movie itself is pretty much just routine, insofar as gialli throwbacks in 2022 are "routine". It's a very plain-looking film, with clean and crisp images that do not show any evidence of the colorful madness of Argento's best, nor even the more basic "spooky atmosphere" of his middle-tier. That 86-minute running time happily means that there's no bloat, but there's not much in the way of using pacing to crank up the suspense, either; individual scenes become queasily thrilling and tense (generally those individual scenes where somebody ends up dead), but this doesn't really carry across the course of the movie. The only real aesthetic personality it has comes from composer Arnaud Rebotini, who provides an outstanding, fearlessly cheesy electronica score to give this all some droning menace (Rebotini came on after Daft Punk, originally announced to do the music, broke up; there's a little bit of "in the style of Daft Punk" going on here, but not enough to feel like the score doesn't have its own thing going on). Music being one of the cornerstones of Argento's entire filmography, it's great to see this return accompanied by one of the best scores any of his films have received since the heart of his golden age. It's not enough to give the film the "oomph" it would need to be more than a perfectly fine and largely unmemorable serial killer thriller, but it's something. Heck, the fact that this is all the way as good as "perfectly fine and largely unmemorable" is pretty much an across-the-board triumph. And if nothing else, it has done the Lord's work by ensuring that, whatever happens, Argento's last film isn't going to be Dracula 3D. It's not much, but I'm glad to have it.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: dario argento, gialli, italian cinema, mysteries, thrillers
