Dark Glasses (2022)

aka Black Glasses

Original title: Occhiali neri

As if two-fisted prostitute Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) didn’t have enough trouble with fighting off horrible costumers, she becomes the next target of a serial killer murdering sex workers. Diana manages to escape a first murder attempt via a car chase, but ends up crashing into a car of a Chinese family. The parents of the family are killed or lethally wounded, and only a little boy we will later learn to be named Chin (Andrea Zhang) survives. Diana herself is blinded in the crash, while the killer gets away unscathed and unidentified.

Being a rather tough cookie, our heroine only falls into depression over her new disability for a very short time, and becomes independent again very quickly indeed with the help of public service lady Rita (Asia Argento) and her very own seeing eye/attack dog. Diana feels guilty about the accident and visits little Chin in his orphanage. During this, she impresses him so greatly, he soon turns up at her doorstep, asking her for shelter until his mother gets out of the coma she’s clearly never going to get out of. Diana has no problem harbouring an escaped orphan, and the duo buddy up quite nicely.

Alas, the killer – remember him? – still has his mind set upon murdering Diana. Surely, now that she’s blind and taking care of a little boy, she’s going to be easier to kill…

Most viewers seem to loathe this late entry into the career of the once great Dario Argento with a passion, so much so I found myself somewhat surprised by actually being entertained by it, sometimes even charmed by its wackier elements. But then, if I remember correctly, I did even find quite a few things to enjoy about Argento’s Dracula.

This giallo is certainly a technically and formally much superior proposition to that movie. Argento doesn’t seem to be in as wildly and trashy an experimental mood as he was there, but he has not returned to the blandness of Giallo or The Card Player either. Though this is still far from the style and beauty of Argento’s classic movies, he does seem to attempt to return to some of the aesthetic pleasures of his past. So here, you can at the very least witness some technically accomplished stalk and suspense sequences, quite a handful of carefully framed shots, and a film that has a degree of visual flow and drive again. Compared to the giallos from Argento’s bad phase, this feels not so much like a return to form, but like a return to genuine interest in the aesthetic forms and joys that were always Argento’s great strengths.

Of course, if one really wants to, one should have no problem smacking Dark Glasses down for the often highly peculiar ways its script finds to get Diana and Chin into trouble, ways rather off the trodden paths of plot logic and reason; it’s not so much that no character here ever makes good decisions, it’s that everyone always makes the most bizarre ones imaginable. Also, there are snakes in the weirdest places. The thing is, narrative logic has never been one of Argento’s strengths, and I really can’t bring myself to criticize the man for exactly the dream logic I’ve so often praised about his films. Particularly since the script puts quite a bit of effort into developments becoming increasingly intense-hysterical in a way that may or may not be Argento poking a bit of fun at himself, or just the great old man being himself very much indeed.

There are also some rather new developments in Argento land, namely a streak of friendly sentimentality that comes to the fore in the whole Chin business (which it is best to simply accept as the film delivers it instead of thinking about it, too hard or at all) as well as in his continued love for murderous animals as seen in the dog business; though there, the sentimentality is obviously spiced with a bit of gore. Argento’s gotten so soft, Asia is only brutally murdered in this one.

That’s what we call “Altersmilde” in Germany.