In short: Red Screening (2020)

aka The Last Matinee

Original title: Al morir la matinée

A rainy night in the early 90s. Engineering student Ana (Luciana Grasso) certainly has not expected the night she gets when she takes over the night part of a double shift for her projectionist father. The cinema is nearly empty – one suspects “Frankenstein – Day of the Beast” isn’t quite the attraction – so it should be a quiet enough night, but a mysterious killer (Ricardo Islas, godfather of Uruguayan indie horror as well as the director of said “Day of the Beast”) is murdering his way through the audience that is there in increasingly gory ways. That’s what you get when you light your cinema in the reds and greens of Italian horror, I fear.

I’m often not terribly fond of films like Maximiliano Contenti’s Red Screening that mostly seem to exist to pay very heavy stylistic homages to other movies, but then, many films of this kind never manage to reach the aesthetic joys of the films they are looking up to. This one, on the other hand, would have been a major entry into the later, most gory parts of the giallo if it had been made thirty, thirty-five years ago. It not only presents increasingly insane and surreal gore gags with just the right gloopy and unreal quality to make them interesting as well as parts of the mood of the film, but even before the first drop of blood falls, Contenti uses all the best elements of the Argento-style giallo to build a dream-like mood of artificial rain, strange colours and a spot-on soundtrack, and uses a certain nostalgic view on the bad sides of the cinema going experience to great effect. It’s a bit like one of those French or Italian elegies on the cinema, just with an eye on better movies, and more eye mutilation. And yes, apart from the homage, the film does quite obviously have a thing or two to say about the act of seeing and watching in horror movies.

Of course, it’s not just Italian horror and US slashers and Bigas Luna the film is built on. The double homage to Islas is rather wonderful, not just including one of his films (that looks much better on the screen of the movie house than in the version I’ve seen) but also using him as the increasingly inhuman and bloodied killer (final girls can be rather brutal). Islas is great in the role, giving a physical performance that really makes the panic of his victims perfectly believable.

Contenti’s direction is often spectacular, doing the classic low budget filmmaker trick of turning the need to keep the number of locations and characters into a virtue, using a lack of resources to produce a tightness of space and time. Though, really, Red Screening doesn’t make the impression of lacking anything at all – the production design, the look, the whole aesthetics feel exactly as they should be and are meant to be.