Mother’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true
As time went by, the idea that the story of the Third Mother would ever see the light of day grew increasingly remote, especially as Argento’s reputation took a hefty fall in the early ’90s (for myself, I had not previously seen any of his films later than 1987’s Opera, and I must take it on faith that they really are as silly and flaccid as is typically claimed). But lo and behold, the filmmaker finally got his act together, and 27 years later, he finally debuted Mother of Tears or The Third Mother at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival. Sad to say, it might have been better if he had just let sleeping corpses lie.
Where Suspiria told of Mater Suspiriorum, Mother of Sighs, the eldest and most powerful sister, and Inferno told of Mater Tenebrarum, Mother of Shadows, the youngest and most vicious, Mother of Tears is about…I bet you can probably guess. I’m not terribly interested in recapping the whole affair about how the beautiful Mater Lachrimarum (Moran Atias) is revived as the population of Rome goes crazy and plunges into an anarchy of murders and rapes, and how only Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento), an art student with otherworldly gifts, can stand against the Mother. This is a Dario Argento film. The plot isn’t going to survive a whole lot of close analysis, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
No sir, we come to an Argento picture for the surreal, Baroque imagery (that Argento’s films are at once surreal and Baroque is one of the chief reasons that he is so damned easy to love), and though much in Mother of Tear fits either or both of those descriptions, there’s a great deal of it that’s also quite gaudy and goofy and, dare I say, campy. That’s not a very satisfying word to describe a director whose best works are deadly serious even though they make not a trace of sense.
Perhaps, I am wrong in this. I would dearly love to be; I’d dearly love if in ten years I came back to the new film and understood how brilliantly it fits in with Argento’s masterpieces, and from that moment loved it as I love its precursors. But right now, all I see is a frequently-successful throwback to the art-horror school that dominated Italian genre filmmaking from the ’60s into the ’80s, that spends a little too much time peering over the edge into mindless exploitation, and falls right over that edge just often enough that it’s hard not to think of the stupid moments first and above all.
There is plenty here that works, like gangbusters: for example, a scene early on where a woman with a stroller stops abruptly and tosses her baby off of a bridge would surely rank among the most shocking and haunting moments in all of Italian horror. The deaths are all staged like nothing in an American film since the 1970s, absolutely coated in blood but fantastic, like something from a dream. And of course it’s impossible not to love Asia Argento, the director’s daughter – okay, I suppose it’s possible, given that she’s actually kind of a terrible actress, but she has such ineluctable presence! Few performers have ever shared her ability to dominate the screen just by standing in front of a camera. I could maybe have done without the shower scene – her fucking dad made the movie. Still.
But for every truly iconic moment, there’s something just plain silly to counterbalance it. For one thing, this is an unexpectedly exploitive movie for the director. Not that I mind exploitation per se, Lord knows, particularly in these bleak and sanitised days, but there really does come a point where enough nudity and lesbianism ceases being at all titillating or scandalising, and it starts to induce giggles. Mother of Tears shoots past that point early on and never looks back. Then there are other things, like the monkey. See, one of the Mother’s henchmen is a monkey that stalks around, hunting for Sarah. I suppose it’s plausible that a monkey – a bit like a tiny deformed human, really – could be an effective element in a horror film. But that’s not the first thing you’re going to think. You’re going to think, “awesome, a monkey!”, when you’re not busy having flashes to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I hate to end on such a trite note as this, but the film basically feels like a parody of Argento, rather than an actual Argento film. All of the ingredients are there, but done over-the-top and without the ineffable atmosphere that a masterpiece like Suspiria contains. Without doubt it’s head and shoulders over the shiny commercial crap that currently passes for horror in American, but compared to what might have been, it’s an absolute disappointment.
6/10