Dark Glasses
His name once synonymous with Italian horror, director Dario Argento returns to the sunny suburban boulevards of Rome with his first film in ten years, Dark Glasses (Occhiali neri), though the script co-written with Franco Ferrini, his collaborator on Phenomena and Lamerto Bava’s Demoni and its sequel, was originally conceived ten years before that and shelved when the production company handling it went bankrupt.
Whether the resurrection of the project justifies the wait and effort is unlikely, Dark Glasses serving as a dubious vehicle for They Call Me Jeeg‘s Ilenia Pastorelli as high-class prostitute Diana, blinded in an accident, and Agony’s Asia Argento as Rita, the helper who is assigned as her mobility and orientation instructor but finds herself in as much danger as her fearful and ludicrously stubborn client.
Opening with an eclipse which serves no purpose within the later plot other than perhaps to emphasise the difference between light and dark, hardly a novel concept which an audience requires explaining, after her car is rammed from behind by the van her assailant is driving, causing a fatal accident, Diana is told by the police that she is the fourth prostitute to have been attacked and presumably the only one to have survived.
The seven-year-old son of the immigrant Chinese couple in the other car taken into the care of an orphanage, when Diana visits the convent to see Chin (Xinyu Zhang) he follows her home, Diana only person to have shown him kindness, acting as her eyes when she is again targeted by the man whose identity is easy to guess and whose motivation for murder seems somewhat of an overreaction to the circumstances.
The police portrayed as idiots – one officer stands in the way of a speeding vehicle while his partner hangs up a call to her superior when she hears shots fired rather than asking for immediate backup – nor is Diana a strategic thinker, leaving her phone behind when she flees and at no point considering that when escaping from a knife-wielding maniac into the darkened forest that whispering might be less conspicuous than shouting.
The dialogue reading like a rushed first draft and the twists seeming to be placeholders until better ideas could be found, it is astonishing that Dark Glasses did not undergo revision at any time in the two decades it languished in pre-production, a substandard thriller which would go unremarked were it not for the headline name attached to it, the eclipse conceivably representing the shadow which has fallen on Argento’s career.
Dark Glasses will be available on Shudder from Thursday 13th October
