INFERNO
A film review by Mike Watson
Copyright 1997 Mike Watson
DIRECTOR: Dario Argento SCREENPLAY: Dario Argento STARRING: Leigh McCloskey, Daria Nicolodi, Irene Miracle MUSIC: Keith Emerson RUNTIME: 103 minutes RATING: 3 out of 5
Frustrating yet seductive, incoherent yet intriguing, by turns beautiful, horrifying and just plain silly. INFERNO is all this, and then some. The second of only two supernaturally-themed thrillers directed by cult Italian filmmaker Dario Argento in his 30 year career, INFERNO occupies his most ambitious period spanning from the classic DEEP RED (1975) through to OPERA (1987).
The film's premise - and what a muddy, obtuse thing it is - concerns the origins of an old apartment building in New York. A curious tenant named Rose (Irene Miracle) buys an old book written by a mad architect and alchemist who claims that the building is home to one of the "Three Mothers". The book offers a number of clues about the building that will help uncover the resident Mother's secrets. Argento's script would have us believe that the Three Mothers "rule the world" from their houses in Germany, Rome and New York with "tears, sighs and darkness". And that they are, in fact, one being: Death.
This central premise is the film's chief flaw. Not for a second can the viewer really believe that these insignificant buildings and the women who had them built are the actual earthly embodiment of "Death". The various goings on - Rose's investigations, her violent murder, her brother Mark's arrival to investigate further - are all so utterly trivial in comparison. Argento is talking about the very personification of Death here, the force which effects every living being on planet earth. Yet he offers us events and settings of absolutely no global significance and peoples his story with nobodies.
But if you accept your own, lesser premise - for example, that these sisters are evil, bad-ass women who possess a real power from their dabbling in the black arts - INFERNO becomes much more digestible. One astonishing, hypnotic scene follows Rose's descent to the basement in search of one of the clues or "keys". Now if you discovered a room in a basement completely submerged in water, would you dive in? No, but our heroine does, in a marvellous sequence devised (uncredited, mind you) by the late great Mario Bava, his last contribution to film before his death.
After a narrow escape from...well, I won't spoil it for you, Rose writes a letter to her brother Mark in Rome begging him to come to New York. But the resident Mother in Rome - a beautiful, ghostly apparition - somehow intervenes so that the letter is almost destroyed before Mark can read it. After a strange scene with an alchemist in an old library and two bloody murders, Mark stumbles upon the letter's remaining fragments and then sets of to New York, only to discover his sister has disappeared.
Argento's direction - the poetic scene changes, the gliding camerawork, the brilliant use of Keith Emerson's classical rock score - is often masterful. Particularly well executed is a scene later in the film when a tenant falls victim to a sudden and frenzied attack by about a dozen cats. But although Agento's murder scenes throughout INFERNO are typically stylish and bloody, the generally disjointed narrative does rob them of some dramatic power. And we don't get answers to a perfectly reasonable question: just who or what is that silhouette doing the killing?
Argento certainly extracts maximum effect from art director Guiseppe Bassan's beautiful gothic interiors designed for the New York apartment building. The intense reds and blues strongly echo the look of the Agento's previous film SUSPIRIA, which Bassan also designed. Mark's eventual discovery of the Mother's lair - a gleaming, surreal, stunningly ornate gothic interior - is genuinely exciting. And for all the story's flaws, not to mention some very lame dialogue, the ending of INFERNO is curiously satisfying.
A much discussed film, this. Argento's reported excuse for INFERNO'S incoherence is that when he read a book on alchemy - for which the film is apparently a metaphor - he simply couldn't understand it. Perhaps, then, he should have let someone else write the screenplay. But in Argento's career that hasn't often happened. His filmmaking style is a very personal one - with Argento the director, you also get Argento the writer. And that, I imagine, is the way it will always be.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews