I told a friend that Dario Argento's new film, Dark Glasses (2022) strikes me as what you might get if you fed his old film, Cat O' Nine Tails, into an AI filmmaking engine. It would be equally soulless, but maybe that's being unkind. Dark Glasses isn't the same kind of car wreck Argento was making when last we met. Whatever the new film's deficiencies, it is an absolute baller in comparison to his Dracula. Faint praise, I know. For a brief period at the start, I thought the Argento of the early 1970s was behind the camera. The opening sequence is creepier and more suggestive of a world out of joint than the entirety of the director's output this century. But it was not to be...
The film opens with Diana driving through Rome. Every person she passes on the street has their face upturned to the sky, shielded by dark glass or sunglasses. They are watching an eclipse. Diana stops her car and joins the throng at a park. She too looks up at the eclipse with her naked eye, then looks away as if burned. She puts her sunglasses back on. Later, a woman is leaving an assignation with a client. The hotel offers to call for a ride, but she declines. Just outside the hotel, she is attacked and killed by a man with a steel cello-string garrotte, who makes his escape in a white van. Diana, like the murdered woman, is a sex worker, and on her way home from a session with her own client, she is chased by a man in a white van, whose pursuit caused a terrible traffic accident when Diana's car collides with a car on a cross street. The passengers in that car are killed, but Diana survives, though her resulting injuries leave her blind. Her recovery is aided by Rita, who works to help the newly-blind adjust and become self-sufficient, and Chin, a local boy from China who is struggling to fit in in a new country. He vows to help Diana, though without telling his parents where he is. Diana also trains with a guide dog, who becomes her protector as well as her eyes. The police are interested in Diana, both because she's the victim of what appears to be a serial killer and because they suspect her of kidnapping Chin. Unfortunately, the man in the white van is also still interested in her, and between the cops and the killer, she finds her life under constant stress. Once the killer begins to murder the people in her orbit, she must take her safety into her own hands, protecting not just herself, but Chin as well...
It's been ten years since Dario Argento made a film. His last flurry of output produced The Mother of Tears and Dracula 3-D, two films so colossally inept that it's no shock that the director languished on ice for a full decade. I almost wish the Argento of Mother of Tears was behind the camera for Dark Glasses, because that director was unbounded by the tyranny of the well-made movie. Whatever his failings, he took risks. Dark Glasses, by contrast, is safe. It's a retreat to giallo, a form that Argento pioneered at the start of his career. And if it had retreated to those films, then maybe Dark Glasses wouldn't be such a slog. Instead, it calls to mind the director's late giallo films like The Card Player or Do You Like Hitchcock? The fact that this was written in 2002, largely contemporary with those films, explains some of its stylistic kinship with them.
In some ways, this is classic Argento. You have a central protagonist who is a witness to a crime but who has perceptual limitations. The usual structures of society are breaking down around her as the murderer slowly strips away anyone who might help her. You even have the crime itself as a tearing of the veil, in which the protagonist's world is stripped away and replaced with a world of utter chaos. You can even sense some of this in that metaphysical prologue with the eclipse, which provides a nice foreshadowing of both Diana's impending blindness and of a world blotted out by darkness. Some of the director's more particular tics are present in the film, too, including the absolutely savage murder of one of his own family members (Asia Argento plays Rita, the woman from the Society for The Blind) and, if I'm honest, some of his well-documented misogyny. By framing several of his characters--including the protagonist--as sex workers, he implies a punishment narrative. What this lacks is Argento's characteristic abstraction. This is a film that is flatly reportorial. Only the score by Arnaud Rebotini recalls the overbearing style of the director's best film, doing a manful imitation of Goblin if they had been retooled for the present moment.
But the rest? Meh. The performances aren't good, and I don't know if I can chalk that up to my own blindness toward performances in languages in other languages or not. The end of the film suggests the director is doing penance for past films toward his canine characters (in, for example, Inferno). I doubt he could have found a more annoying kid. This is an era of absolutely astonishing child actors, but I wonder how much of that is down to directors learning how to use child actors. If it's on the directors, then Argento is particularly derelict here. One thing in the film's favor, perhaps because it's Italian and would never live down the fashion faux pas, is the fact that Diana's lingerie when it's on screen is high end. She must have been making a pretty good living before her blindness. The film has a dim view of the men who go to sex workers, though, for whom that high end lingerie is worn. Sex workers themselves must be immaculately gorgeous, while their clientele can be seen as gross, the type of men who could never get a woman without paying for it. But that's only a small part of the film. The killer himself, when he's revealed, is also a disappointment, and is maybe a counterpoint to Diana's clients. This is a dude who could absolutely get it, but instead he hates women so much that he must destroy them. Maybe Diana's clients aren't so bad after all. You can never tell with men. The concept of Schrödinger's rapist (murderer here) definitely applies. Worst of all, this is a category of film where other players outclass what's on screen. This film's closest analogues are Julia's Eyes and Blink, while the 800 lb. gorilla is Wait Until Dark. Argento provides no reasons whatsoever to prefer Dark Glasses over those films. None at all.
Ultimately this is a film that makes a promise at the start and fails to deliver. Par for the course for later Argento, alas. I wonder if he's even capable of the kinds of stylistics with which he made his name or if that's all behind him. I wonder if his financiers even permit that level of freedom anymore. If there is no more of that, then it's a shame. Everything beautiful passes from the world. Every beautiful sight fades to black in the end.
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