Tenebrae

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Tenebre (Tenebrae)

August 11th 2010 02:16

“There was only once answer to the fury that tortured him …”

When Dario Argento announced he was beginning production on a new movie early in 1982, many critics and fans assumed he would be telling the story of the Mother of Tears, and completing the third part of the trilogy which had began with Suspiria (1977) and followed with Inferno (1980), but instead Argento wanted a break from the supernatural realm, and had decided to return to his roots: the giallo.

Tenebrae (1982) is a complex murder mystery but told in Argento’s trademark style where the parts are more important than the whole, where atmosphere consumes the mise-en-scene, and mood and tone saturate the narrative. Tenebre means shadows or darkness, and Argento wanted to explore the horror of seemingly random violence, the deep black core of psychological madness, yet expose it in a world of colour and light, of deliberately smooth line and form. Pull the nightmare out of the spooky shadows and thrust it into the glare of modern reality.

Tenebrae Anthony Franciosa, Carola Stagnora, Guiliano Gemma

Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) with Inspector Altieri (Carola Stagnora) and Captain Giermani (Guiliano Gemma)

Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa, in a part intended for Christopher Walken), is a crime novelist. His latest publication, Tenebrae, is creating quite a stir. It’s a bestseller on the Italian book lists and so he’s off to Rome for a publicity tour. Joined by his assistant Anna (Daria Nicolodi, dubbed by Theresa Russell for the more widely seen English-language version), his agent Bulmer (John Saxon, who very strangely has no recollection of making the movie!), and Bulmer’s young assistant Gianni (Christian Borromeo), Neal settles into a hotel suite, but before he can unpack he is visited by Captain Giermani (Guiliano Gemma) and Inspector Altieri (Carola Stagnaro) who are investigating a horrific double murder that appears to be linked to the author, as pages of his novel were stuffed in the mouth of one of the victims.

Veronica Lario as Peter's wife Jane

John Saxon as Bulmer

And so begins Argento’s bizarre, indulgent, uneven and altogether fascinating return to the genre that made him famous. He would return to it a few more times with Opera (1987), Sleepless (2001), The Cardplayer (2004), and most recently, Giallo (2009), with varying levels of success. Tenebrae doesn’t command the exhilarating technique of Deep Red (1975), nor does it exude the classic traditional feel of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), but it commands the viewer nevertheless. It features many elements that are the hallmarks of Argento’s stylistic excesses, but most significantly, it possesses a certain je ne sais quoi that elevates the viewing experience beyond all its trappings, its limitations, its flaws.

Eva Robins as the woman in the killer's flashbacks

Tenebrae is definitely a flawed movie, but only Dario Argento can get away with such glaring inconsistencies, such stilted dialogue, and yet still deliver a masterful exercise in cinema mise-en-scene. The acting is ripe and ropey at best, the pacing thrusts and stumbles in equal measure, and the special effects used in all the violent set pieces are dodgy as hell (apart from a superb axe to the head shot), but then, apart from Opera, nearly all of Argento’s gory set-pieces in all his movies are unconvincing in their graphic realism, the blood is usually too bright for starters, and the prosthetic appliances often look fake, but it’s the tone and set-up for the set-piece that makes Argento’s ultra-violence so compelling and memorable. His horror brilliance isn’t in the authenticity; it’s in the illusion of it, the nightmare intent, and the garish execution.

Ania Pieroni, who played the Mother of Tears briefly in Inferno, plays Elsa

Mirella D'Angelo as Tilda

To fully appreciate Dario Argento’s movies you have to embrace an aesthetic and a tone that doesn’t really exist with many other directors. Despite the inherent (ir)rationale in narrative logic you simply can’t deny Argento’s pull of the cinematic shroud stretching the dream-like fabric, even if its just a crime thriller. His red-herrings, his strange interludes, his obsession with beautiful women (along with an overt “Hitchcockian” visual style, this is something he and Brian De Palma share), his penchant for elaborate death scenes, his unseen killers and their POVs … these are all part and parcel with Argento’s horror oeuvre.

Ow! That's gotta hurt!

Curiously Argento explained that Tenebrae takes place in a Rome set five years in the future, yet there is nothing visually within the movie that confirms this. What is apparent is there is nothing tying the movie to the classic Roma; no shots of the Colosseum, or Trevi fountain, Classical statuary, Renaissance paintings or churches, nothing that defines Rome. Instead Tenebrae takes place in a city of dazzling white concrete, high-rise apartments, malls, airports, television studios, and expensive private modern homes. There is no clutter or superfluous ornamentation; it’s all stark design, remote, sparse, and lit with a cold, clear light. Perhaps this is the vague reference to the future, that the wealthy have left the city, abandoned it. This cold reality is evident certainly in one of the movie’s stand-out scenes when young Lara (Maria Alboretto) taunts a Doberman from behind a high fence which then manages to jump its confines and pursues the terrified girl down a dark empty street, across a vast lawn and over another fence and finally into the private property of a wealthy, and very dangerous, photographer.

That'd sting a bit too

The psycho-sexual sub-plot which features transsexual Eva Robins (aka Robert Coatti) as a striking young woman who is involved in the humiliation of the serial killer, which is shown in a series of flashbacks, is one of the dark keys to Tenebrae’s puzzle. But, like the colour of the shiny stiletto’s on woman’s feet, it’s there to screw with your mind. Just as Peter Neal’s own book is criticised (in a searing analogy for the criticism of Argento’s own movies) as being “sexist crap” by female journalist Tilda (Mirella D’Angelo), and Neal is accused of hating women. Argento is first to admit he much prefers to place beautiful women in peril and have them terrorised and murdered than ugly women (and men), and he refuses to justify himself to anyone.

Nothing like a bit of phallic humiliation to fuel a psycho-sexual thriller

Tenebrae was Argento’s most sensual movie to date, even though sex and sexual role-playing feature in his previous movies, Tenebrae was the first to display an overtly erotic aspect. It is fraught with an anxiety that is specifically sexual in nature, voluptuous even. The climatic last quarter of the movie involves several blatant phallic/ejaculatory images, such as the extreme arterial spray from the severed arm, and the spike that impales the killer.

The art of impalement

Argento loves his iconography (like a close-up of water washing blood off a straight razor) and architecture, and no more blatant and indulgent is it than in the extended (and utterly pointless, but still mesmerising) sequence where the camera watches one woman through a window on one level of a house, then travels up over the rooftop, across the width of the apartment building, down the other side, and ends up watching another woman on the other side on another floor through another window. Argento was simply playing with his new toy, the fancy remote-controlled Louma crane, and only he could get away with it. Just.

Anna (Daria Nicolodi) releases her inner hysteria

Last, but not least, we come to the throbbing, addictive soundtrack composed by members of prog-rock outfit Goblin, who provided Argento with the nightmarish scores to Deep Red and Suspiria. The dark disco-charged main theme which is used several times through the movie from the opening sequence where the narrator describes the insane bloodlust of the killer to the Louma crane sequence, is up with the greatest horror themes ever composed (up there with Carpenter’s Halloween and Goblin’s own Suspiria).

Originally Tenebrae was filmed in Italian (lazily Argento didn’t bother to cover a handful of shots that show text in Italian with the English translation for the international version he was obviously intending to do), and in the States the movie was heavily cut (by ten minutes) and re-titled Unsane (a great title in itself). In Japan the movie was given the literal English translation of Shadows.

Tenebrae ends abruptly, but satisfyingly jagged and harsh, with Anna screaming hysterically in the cold rain, her cries of abject horror carrying over into the end credits. This is not Argento’s best work, yet it still works well, and continues to pulsate with a cold sweat, providing the bad dreams modern horror so badly needs.

Here’s the trailer:

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Posted By: Bryn - Category: movie reviews

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Comments

5 Comments. [ Add A Comment ]

Comment by Matt Shea

August 11th 2010 03:53

20/20 Filmsight

Exhaustive review, Bryn, even for you

I've heard so much about this film's blood content but have never managed to check it out myself.

Unsane - love it.

Comment by JMD

August 11th 2010 04:04

Well, I can see you are a fan of Mr.Argento. This was a well written review for a good director. The descriptions of the fx and set pieces were spot on. His films always did have that creepy, eerie feeling that unfortunately, we don't really get in today's horror movies. So, have any other Argento films you might be reviewing soon?

Comment by Bryn

August 11th 2010 04:21

Horrorphile

Matt, cheers, yes, long time coming this one. Yeah, I love the title Unsane as well.

JMD, thank you! I've written several other Argento reviews over the past few years. Look back through this review and click on any Argento movie title in yellow (Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Suspiria, Inferno, Opera). Enjoy!

Comment by JohnDoe

August 11th 2010 14:16

Film & TV on DVD

Finally got around to sharing your feelings in writing about this one Bryn, good to see.

I know you love for Argento and it comes through loud and clear in your descriptive review.

Tenabre is certainly one of his must see films for fans and for me personally it was actually the first of his films that I saw on the bigscreen.

Excellent work.