After the baroque excess of Inferno, it is difficult not to figure Dario Argento’s Tenebrae as a retreat of sorts, a re-entrenchment in the (admittedly twisty) narrative form of the giallos that Argento cut his teeth on after the florid excess of Suspiria and the delirious nightmare Inferno  so boldly and provocatively cast themselves in other directions entirely. If Suspiria was narratively curious and Inferno openly narrative hostile, Tenebrae is, comparatively, a relatively straightforward murder mystery rather than a cosmic exploration of worlds beyond our very capacity to perceive them, a curiosity beyond which the word “mystery” is adequate for.

It is, however, Argento, so it’s a sterling murder mystery as far as it goes, one with more than a few tricks up its sleeve. A series of straight razor murders by a prototypically giallo-esque black-gloved killer express familiarity with, even affinity for, the work of mystery author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), visiting Rome with his agent Bullmer (John Saxon) and assistant Anna (Daria Nicolodi). Confronted by the avid fan Detective Germani (Giuliano Gemma), Peter also witnesses brief flickers of his wife Jane McKerrow (Veonica Lario), who has apparently followed him, despite him having little interest in her, nor her in him. This is very much unlike TV interviewer Cristiano Berti (John Steiner), who seems deeply invested in the sexual rage, subliminal neuroticism, and fervent moralism he reads into the Neal’s books.

The latter is the easiest codex for the film’s interests. Tenebrae is a deeply metatextual giallo, the most obviously Hitchcockian of Argento’s films, the most adroitly focused on the dangers and demeanors of filmmaking and filmmakers. Characters repeatedly allude to or outright discuss art and its relation to reality, the murderers are shot with typically fetishistic allure, an interviewer remarks that the novels only treat women as objects. Argento seems to cheerily affirm much of this, although the film quietly complicates and dissents as it coils its way into the back half and exhibits a genuine fright about its own complicity with the killings it depicts. Hardly an unexpected move for a horror film in that era or now, but Tenebrae is slithering and slimy enough to justify the autocritique.

I find myself strangely hesitant with Tenebrae, ultimately, given its relative hesitance with itself. I wish it was more earnestly detestable or more thoroughly improbable, rather than merely reasonably detestable and remotely improbable. But it’s hard to argue with this film’s nastiest cuts. Early on, the film all but announces its murderer, and rather than turning this into a red herring, it seems to have its cake and eat it too, both giving us the obvious murderer and rendering that fact essentially irrelevant, a narrative en route to more interesting terrain rather than the film’s raison d’ etre. Tenebrae, unable to throw itself head-first into the abyss, is always ultimately merely en route to something more interesting, but it’s amusing enough to experience the search.

Score: 7/10

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.