What’s Dark Glasses about?
Diana, an Italian woman, is pursued by a vicious serial killer targeting prostitutes in Rome. Following a car accident, she is left blind and fearing for her life. When Chin, the orphaned boy who lost his parents in the accident, comes to stay with her, Diana finds an unlikely ally in her quest to survive the killer’s relentless pursuit.
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Dark Glasses Review
It’s been ten long years since Dario Argento’s last film, the ill-received Dracula 3D (the one where the Count turns into a giant praying mantis), a film I probably made it fifteen minutes into before turning it off. In the ensuing years, one could be forgiven for thinking Argento had retired from filmmaking. But in the last year, the Italian director has returned to screens as both a lead actor (in Gaspar Noe’s Vortex) and with his own film, Occhiali Neri / Dark Glasses, a return to the Giallo genre in which he made his name.
And the octogenarian has crafted a pleasingly solid flick that, while not up there with his ‘70s classics like Deep Red or Tenebre, is certainly not an embarrassment, and even injects a fair amount of heart through the relationship between the blind Diana and Chin, the runaway orphan. The director’s daughter Asia Argento also shows up as Rita, an aide and friend to Diana, helping her navigate her blindness and even setting her up with a guide dog, the loyal Nerea, who saves Diana on a few occasions.
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The eclipse that kicks off the film sets an ominous tone, with everyone in the city noticing the eclipse except Diana, who eventually gazes at it, affecting her eyes in the process, a blatant foreshadowing of her impending blindness. Her affliction adds considerably to her vulnerability, from the cynical, disbelieving detectives who interview her, to trying to continue her sex work and evading the persistent killer. It harkens somewhat to the superior Spanish thriller ‘Julia’s Eyes’ from 2010 (also available on Shudder), with a blind female protagonist caught in a killer’s web.
As is synonymous with the Giallo of yesteryear, Argento’s camera leers over Diana’s naked body in much the same way it lingers on scenes of violence, such as the opening kill where an unfortunate woman gets her throat garotted, although this shocking kill is undercut by the huge crowd that gathers around the dying woman, with no one offering to help, instead gasping and watching her bleed out.
Despite the male gaze on display, the film does have a lot of empathy for Diana, whose profession is frowned upon by many around her, from the detectives to even Diana’s maid, who mutters that her blindness is ‘God’s punishment.’ Diana’s role as surrogate mother to Chin is well sketched, even if that ultimately takes a backseat to thrills and kills in the third act.
Argento hasn’t lost any impact when it comes to the kills, with garish throat slits, throat rips and the classic Giallo knife-work by a black gloved killer. He also injects some animal action when Diana and Chin run into a snake-filled river, plus Nerea, the aforementioned guide dog, who gets in on the action several times.
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There has always been a certain amount of goofy logic present in Argento’s films, and indeed many of the Italian films in the genre, where logic often takes a backseat to mood and convoluted plotting that often builds to a bloody delirium in the climax when the killer and their modus operandi is revealed. Here, Argento bucks tradition by revealing the killer about halfway through, and the story is less about their bloody quest and more about Diana and Chin’s relationship and their fight for survival.
For a director with some iconic film scores in his heyday from the likes of Ennio Morricone and Goblin, the Dark Glasses score by Arnaud Rebotini is clearly influenced by the synths of the latter and John Carpenter, occupying a similar if more simplistic space. But despite being fairly derivative of better scores, it works well with the film, going from moody synthscapes to pulsing techno when the action calls for it.
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Dark Glasses Overall
If this is to be Argento’s last film, then he has done his legacy proud with this simple Giallo, which doesn’t reinvent the wheel (the script has been sitting around since 2002) but is lifted by the director’s skills and the zeroing in on the relationship between Diana and Chin amongst all that garish red blood.
What did you think of Dark Glasses?
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