A prostitute blinded by a stalker tries to protect a young boy. But in his first film in 10 years, Dario Argento opts for visuals as banal as the scares.
Five decades ago, the Italian director Dario Argento (“Suspiria,” “Inferno”) melded slasher flicks with modern art, saturating the screen with lurid colors that were more captivating than the ideas underneath them. Giallo, the genre Argento popularized and, later, clumsily satirized in a poorly received 2009 film of the same name, is often snubbed as having more style than substance. “Dark Glasses,” Argento’s first film in 10 years, responds by stripping away the style, too.
Visuals are overrated, this intermittently ticklish thriller seems to insist. Argento and his cinematographer, Matteo Cocco, limit the film’s palette to shades of mildewy gray-green spattered by crimson blood (shot, of course, in gruesome close-up). Our heroine, a surly call girl named Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), is too vexed to fuss about this dishwater depiction of Rome. In the opening scene, she irritates her eyes gazing at a solar eclipse; shortly after, she’s blinded when a serial murderer in a van rams her car into oncoming traffic, killing the other driver and orphaning a 7-year-old named Chin (Xinyu Zhang).
How can Diana dodge her deadly stalker when she can’t — and won’t — ever see his face? Argento has masterminded a setup that empowers him to dazzle audiences with sound instead of sight. Oddly, he doesn’t follow through on it, despite declaring his intentions with an extended cameo from his daughter Asia Argento as a care worker who teaches Diana how to listen for aural clues to her surroundings. The inept cops on the case (Mario Pirrello, Maria Rosaria Russo and Gennaro Iaccarino) wax on about the limits of the eye — they’re stymied by fuzzy CCTV footage, microscopic chips of paint, and vehicles that change color from black to white — but the film’s execution never proves their point. In one ineffectual detour, Diana smashes lamps in an attempt to hide from her pursuer. Not only does the scene continue to be filmed in relative brightness, but her brainstorm doesn’t affect the chase one bit.
The scares are as banal as the visuals. Argento made his reputation on tangled yarns where witchy women usually wielded the knife. At 82, he’s finally resorted to a straightforward male-sicko-slays-sex workers tale. He and co-writer Franco Ferrini may believe they’re saying something or other about misogyny. (Even Diana’s non-murderous clients are varying degrees of awful.) Still, the writers seem to have spent little time developing their villain, who is so dashed off that the baddie doesn’t even commit to a weapon, reaching for garrotes, blades, nooses and steering wheels as though from a random grab bag. (At least Arnaud Rebotini’s spidery synthesizers set the right mood.)
Yet, while it’s easy to dismiss “Dark Glasses” as the work of a master gone soft, Pastorelli’s prickly, sharp-tongued Diana is perhaps the most charismatic leading lady of Argento’s career. She dominates her surroundings — a rarity in his films — and delivers a performance that creeps close to camp (particularly while being strangled by a snake). The best moments of the film involve Diana’s unsentimental alliance with Chin, the orphan who offers her more protection than she’s able to afford him. Their quirkily endearing relationship allows the horror legend to dabble in a genre that’s wholly new to him: the odd couple comedy.
Dark Glasses
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Shudder.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
