I haven’t fully gotten these horror movies out of my system, so to get me through the frigid month of February, we’ll continue exploring the depths of hell.

Fresh off his monumental, genre-redefining Suspiria, director Dario Argento certainly didn’t take his success as a cause to rest. If the former film was a cosmic tear, Argento creates a pure void with Inferno, which conjures a breathtakingly demonic and disturbed view of a universe governed by clandestine orders and subterranean truths we can only cower before and never really comprehend. If anything, Inferno is even more devious in that it doesn’t even grant us the typical horror film’s descent from the normal to the uncanny. Rather than wayward rationalists suddenly confronted with the limits of their mental frameworks, Inferno’s characterssimply resonate with the film’s delirious rhythms from the start, hardly questioning any of its narrative contrivances. There is no audience surrogate, no questioning soul, in Inferno, unless we’re all as mad as Argento thinks we are.

Even more so than Argento’s earlier films, Inferno is decidedly ambivalent when it comes to its narrative center, and deeply promiscuous as an exercise in narrative flow. Consider the following. Mark Elliot (Leigh McCloskey) receives a letter from his sister Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle) informing him that she has purchased an occult text from an antique book store operated by a Mr. Kanzanian (Sasha Pitoeff). When Mark realizes she may be in danger, he rushes to New York, but not before the film disorientingly spends an entire act with Mark’s student friend Sara (Eleonora Giorgi), who happens to read the letter as well, before the film remembers that Mark exists and that, now, more than half way through the film, he will be our protagonist. The film’s entire first act follows Rose as she delves into the subject matter of the book, or rather, as we assume she is doing this from her actions, which are presented without editorial comment or even supporting dialogue. What, precisely, she is thinking is entirely opaque. Her face is an abyss as unrevealing as the film itself.

Rather than a Hitchcockian bait and switch a la Hitchcock’s Psycho, to name the most famous horror film to abruptly murder and switch protagonists mid-film, Inferno calls forth demonic urges that seem to mock, to cut down at the knees the possibility of, such narrative creativity.  If Psycho exists in a modernist world of uncertain, rapidly shifting perspective, Inferno occupies a world thoroughly unmoored from our ingrained habits of perception, even our fundamental cosmologies. To think of the characters in an Argento film is simply a mistake. To expect them to correspond to us at all is a fool’s errand. That characters are indexes of human thoughts and feelings is largely irrelevant.

And to view this as a narrative, when it is a precondition and a premonition, is to miss the point entirely. Nominally, Inferno constitutes Argento’s attempt to continue his Three Mothers trilogy focusing on the demonic witches Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum, and Mater Tenebrarum, three films very loosely adapted from Thomas De Quincey’s 1845 poem Suspiria de Profunsi.  But that summary belies what the film is genuinely pursuing, an atmosphere of complete disarray and abjection. This is as close to pure cinema as Argento ever got, a descent into pure imagery and cosmic chaos. It’s also a florid, magnified phantasmagoria arguably even beyond the already intense heights of Suspiria. It isn’t as elegant as that film, nor frankly as consistently compelling, but in the right headspace, the trade-off is almost worth it.

Score: 8/10