There are always well-known filmmakers who make you wonder where they actually got to. Dario Argento is one of them. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Suspiria director created one style-defining horror film after the other. From Profondo Rosso to Tenebrae to Terror in the Opera: Without Argento’s work, the Giallo subgenre would be difficult to imagine.
Black gloves slowly moving into the frame. Eyes wide open, radiating pure fear. And a glistening knife that leaves a trail of red blood. The Giallo is one of them most striking film genres ever. Nevertheless, Argento found it difficult to continue his great success in the new millennium. Two films seemed to have sealed the end of his career: Giallo and Dario Argento’s Dracula.
Dario Argento returns with a new horror film
Argento has not been present in cinemas since 2012. The Italian horror master’s late work has been well received by both critics and audiences hardly met with approval. Too idiosyncratic, too abstract – and above all light years away from the atmospheric masterpieces of his heyday. With Dark Glasses, which celebrated its premiere at the Berlinale, he is back in an all the more impressive way.
You can watch the trailer for Dark Glasses here:
Dark Glasses – Trailer (German) HD
Skepticism was definitely appropriate in advance. What kind of director has Argento transformed into during his 10-year break from cinema? Does he still have the strength after the offbeat films he recently brought to the big screen? captivating frenzy of images to stage? Or will Dark Glasses be a clumsy comeback attempt that will finally catapult Argento into irrelevance?
From the very first moments of Dark Glasses, the director makes it clear that something big is afoot. Of the The moon moves in front of the sun and darkens the earth. For a brief moment, it seems as if Argento even wants to outshine Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall. However, he is not interested in unrestrained destructiveness. He is looking for the uncanny in a spooky Rome.
The streets of the metropolis are deserted. People gather in the park and behind the windows of their homes. They gaze at the solar eclipse as if they were being controlled externally. When all heads stretch towards the sky no one is watching what is happening on earth. A serial killer who is targeting prostitutes takes advantage of this circumstance. The spectacle of the obscured sun is followed by an unparalleled fountain of blood.
Dark Glasses disturbs and touches in equal parts
A wire is stretched to the throbbing sounds of a synthesizer – and of course the black gloves are a must before the red takes over the film. Argento is back in his element. However, Dark Glasses is not just a remix of its well-known strengths in a digital guise: as soon as it focuses on the prostitute Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), the film gains its own identity.
© Alamode Film
Dark Glasses
Diana is also targeted by the mysterious killer, who is particularly noticeable because of his large van, whose headlights look like them gleaming eyes of a hungry monster drill through the night. Without batting an eyelid, the killer drives over everything that comes in his way. Only Diana escapes. But when she wakes up in the hospital, her world has darkened forever.
Survived the attack, lost his eyesight: As if the situation weren’t complicated enough, it turns out that Diana rammed and fatally injured young Chin’s (Xinyu Zhang) parents while chasing them through the streets at night. In the midst of his horror thriller, Argento starts from the unlikely relationship between two people united by their loneliness.
A world collapsed for both of them. Now they have to learn to deal with their new situation. Although Argento through the framing of his images and the use of music never do without an eerie atmosphere wants, an unexpected warmth creeps into his film in the following passages. For every slit throat there is at least one touching moment in Dark Glasses.
With Dark Glasses Argento doesn’t need to hide
The fact that Argento’s film doesn’t collapse because of these contrasts is due to the dreamy mood: at times it feels as if the world had changed with the onset of the solar eclipse transformed into a swirling daydream. Even when the sunlight returns and Rome shines as a cozy idyll again, the horror does not disappear from the film’s consciousness. It keeps coming back.
© Alamode Film
Dark Glasses
From the city center to the remote country house, the struggle for survival in Dark Glasses also tells a story about places. Because his protagonist is blind, Argento gives these places special attention: Be it the familiar apartment that has to be explored from new perspectives, or the walk through a river that reveals itself as the entry into a hell full of snakes.
Dark Glasses shows us a lot, although the heroine of the story can only guess at the concrete horror. The horror displayed in shocking images for us viewers (in the film’s most disturbing scene, a dog shreds a man’s face) is in constant contrast to Diana’s perception. With his cinema return, Argento provides the naturalness of the moving image to the test.
There can be no talk of a tired film or the feared accident. Argento once again uses the big screen as an area of tension and leads us with mesmerizing shots through Rome’s winding streets. Even if Dark Glasses is not a new Suspiria, Argento has not forgotten how to stage menacing moods and follow an exciting heroine in her struggle for survival.
a notice: We published this article in a similar form in February 2022.
*. .
Will you see Dark Glasses in cinemas?