Dark Glasses (Movie Review)

Before I get to Dario Argento's latest film, let's start with a confession: I don't know if I understand Italian horror films. Please, put down your stones. Save them for a later review when I have truly hot take.

"But Vincent," you say, putting a jagged rock back into your pocket, "what could possibly be hard to understand about Italian horror? A zombie fights a shark. A woman gets stabbed in the eye for two minutes. Gloved hands. Intense stares. Rockin' soundtracks. It's all so simple!"

I've been hearing this spiel for years from the horror community, so I kept watching them to try and get it. Why were people raving about these poorly dubbed films with awful writing and wooden characters? Sure, they're stylish and feature attractive people in fashionable clothes suffering some of the gnarliest deaths in cinema, but where's the substance, the drama? Why does the kid from The House by the Cemetery talk like that?

A seldom acknowledged fact about appreciating art, whether it be a novel, TV show, film, or video game, is that frame of mind can determine the experience, no matter how good the art is. How many of you have watched a much-praised movie and found that you enjoyed it less, simply because the hype created impossible expectations? Think about that again. Praise for a film can deflate your enjoyment of it.

And there's the rub. In an era where social media telegraphs everyone's opinions on a film before you've even had a chance to see it, how can you possibly maintain the right frame of mind? (By signing onto the Bloody Good Horror Patreon, of course! On the BGH Slack channel, you and like-minded weirdoes can have frank and enlightening discussions, free from the soul-crushing vacuous horror of all other social media sites. Hooray!)
I digress.

By happenstance, I discovered that the right frame of mind for Italian horror films is an altered state of mind. I do not believe it's a coincidence that these films from the decadent 70s grooving into the early 80s are better enjoyed with [totally legal substances]. Whether you prefer eating a [perfectly normal] brownie or smoking a fat [bratwurst] or finishing a case of malt liquor, I promise that if you get [quite jolly] before a giallo, the plot will almost make sense. In fact, after getting [in the right frame of mind], I managed to watch The New York Ripper without throwing my phone at the TV even once; though I am a surprised the eponymous ripper's Donald Duck voice wasn't a hallucination.

For Dark Glasses, Argento's latest film, I was in the mood for an adult beverage, the cause of and solution to all life's problems. I paired this movie with a Voodoo Ranger IPA, or three, and I don't know if the beer made it any more intelligible, but it certainly made this meandering 86 minute film breeze by. Were I more sober, I might say this film is just for Argento completionists specifically and giallo enthusiasts more broadly.

[light spoilers ensue]
The film starts with our protagonist, Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), looking directly at the sun during a lunar eclipse. Please, reader, never do this. She hurts her eyes, obviously, in what I suppose passes as foreshadowing. I don't know what to make of the main character sharing the name of the Roman moon goddess, because it's not symbolic of anything.

A masked man (Andrea Gherpelli) is out killing call girls, and Diana is next on his list. When he pursues her in his van, she tries to escape but ends up in a head-on car crash that renders her blind and kills most of the Chinese family in the other car. (Get it, she's blind, so she wears Dark Glasses.) The movie slows down to show her adapting to visually-impaired life. I will defer to disability advocates, but it seems like a respectful, if belabored, portrayal of visual impairment. I definitely didn't expect to watch a social worker (Asia Argento!) explain how to navigate a cross walk by sound. Diana even adopts a service dog.

Chin (Xinyu Zhang), the surviving child of the Chinese family, is put into an orphanage, and Diana goes to visit him. Since orphanage life stinks, he runs away to stay with her. Despite the fact that she isn't family, and she has no legal permission to do so, and she's a working call girl, she allows him to stay. Naturally, detectives come to investigate, since she isn't Chin's legal guardian, but they don't have a warrant and Diana's service dog scares them away.
If you're thinking this sounds like a giallo that randomly turns into an indie drama, you're pretty close to the mark. Although there are brief scenes of the masked killer stalking Diana, they don't create a pervasive sense of dread so much as serve as little reminders that we're supposed to be watching a horror movie. It's not bad, but it's probably not what you're expecting if you're looking for another Deep Red or Suspiria.

The back half of the film somewhat makes up for the lack of suspense of the first half. Diana and Chin escape the police and travel to the countryside to stay with the social worker; this is better known as kidnapping a child, by the way. Chin answers a call from the killer and leads him to the country house. Diana and Chin flee through the woods. A random snake attack lightens the mood rather than adding tension. Helpful strangers are murdered, as is horror movie tradition. The final twist is pretty flat, but the scariest moments come at the end when Diana and Chin are in the killer's clutches.

To be honest, Dark Glasses is mostly entertaining because the characters make weird decisions – e.g. kidnapping an orphaned child – and not because it is a compelling horror movie. It doesn't have the style or flash of Dario Argento's earlier films, but if you come to the movie with low expectations and the right frame of mind, you might just enjoy it.