Crystal Eyes (2017)

Original title: Mirada de cristal

Unpleasant and unstable supermodel Alexis Carpenter (Camila Pizzo) causes an accident that gets her burned alive during a fashion show in 80s Buenos Aires. A year later, the fashion magazine queen who produced the whole debacle (Silvia Montanari) decides to run a deeply cynical tribute thread in her magazine, featuring two models Alexis hated, and made with parts of the crew who were also part of the deadly fashion show.

Before the shoot for the project can even start, someone wearing a mannequin version of Alexis’s face as a mask begins murdering their way through the cast, leaving no trace of their victims, who are apparently not missed by anyone either. The unsuspecting survivors eventually gather in a creepy, absurdly labyrinthine mansion for the shoot, or rather to be murdered as well.

There have been quite a few attempts at committing pastiches of the Italian giallo over the decades, but few of these films are quite so specific as Ezequiel Endelman’s and Leandro Montejano’s Mirada de Cristal. The film at hand isn’t just a giallo pastiche, but one of that very particular group of 80s giallos that were influenced by the slasher genre (which itself was of course heavily influenced by earlier giallos) and typically concerned the murders of models.

The film hits the tone and style of these films perfectly. Even its particular flaws are those of the model slasher giallos (or however one wants to dub the sub-genre, if one feels the need to do so at all): to wit, the acting is generally atrocious in a spectacularly stilted and unnatural way that still manages to be overly melodramatic with an extra 80s plastic sheen on top, which adds to the whole affair’s air of unreality rather than distract from any supposed believability. The script is awkwardly structured, full of characters whose only reason to be in the movie at all are their death scenes, and who are all utter bastards. The budget can’t keep up with the film’s ambitions at all, so expect huge fashion events that take place in what looks like a damp cellar in front of an audience of at least ten people.

All of this is utterly in keeping with Crystal Eyes’ filmmaking models, obviously, as is the delight the directors find in using all the aesthetic tricks and traits of the 80s giallo. So here are the peculiar high fashion costumes, the lighting that spits on your naturalism when it can use any strange combination of neon colours instead, the lingering, creeping/creepy quality of most of the shots, the complete disinterest in things looking real when they can look like the wet dream of a cocaine-fuelled 80s set designer instead. It’s really absolutely glorious, or at least, it is if you do enjoy the aesthetic copied here so carefully and wonderfully as much as I and apparently the filmmakers do.

Now, one could complain about Crystal Eyes’ complete unwillingness to make any kind of postmodern comment about the 80s fashion giallo, deconstructing its gender representation, and so on, and so forth, but to me, it seems perfectly in keeping with the soul of a genre where style always was the main substance to not do any of these things, and instead just wallow in the joys of a very specific set of aesthetics.