Whether Dario Argento – 82 years of age – never makes another film, or has a flurry of late activity and makes another five, it is categorically impossible to watch one without the weight of expectations practically pressing you flat. Such is the case with Dark Glasses, a Shudder Original no less (how times have changed, etc.) which feels somehow like it’s all his films and none of them. It tunes into giallo conventions in places, but it feels like a moment’s deja-vu before the tone and style shifts to something else. It feels retro, but it feels modern – not fully modern, more kind of hanging in time somewhere between 2000 and now – well, the screenplay is from back in 2002, so that sort of makes sense, except you also feel like it would have had the same free-floating feel even had it been shot back then (with Asia Argento in the leading role, obviously). Yet for all its oddities, all its bizarre decision-making, it’s not by any means totally dreadful. It’s fairly entertaining, even if scatty and strained. Above all else, it’s fairly entertaining for reasons which go beyond, ‘at least it’s not Dracula‘, which isn’t the greatest claim for a likely swansong to make, but not one wholly without merit, either.
We meet Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), a call girl driving down a residential street in Rome; neither an attentive driver nor a woman who keeps up to date with current affairs, she is distracted by the sight of many people with phones pointed to the skies, waiting for a solar eclipse – something which appears to be a surprise to Diana. It’s made clear that solar eclipses are historically regarded as portentous (especially if you look straight at the sun beforehand) but it’s not made clear whether this has anything to do with a flurry of serial killer activity in the city; in fact, now that I think of it, a detective later mentions that there have already been several victims, so that would be a no. So why is the eclipse in here? I had wondered, knowing from the blurb that Diana loses her sight, whether the eclipse would be somehow responsible; a later scene recalls Day of the Triffids, at least a little, but ultimately the event is just in here for aesthetic, symbolic reasons, if that.
We then discover that there is a man in Rome strangling prostitutes with a cello string (another inclusion which could be symbolic, but turns out not to be. That’s the extent of the false clue trail in this film). As a young woman leaves the hotel room of a client, she is attacked: a large number of people thereafter make no attempts whatsoever to perform first aid, watching her bleed to death from her injuries on the ground. Diana, being in the same line of work, is clearly in danger; we see her being attacked and assaulted in other scenes, and actually in fleeing one ogre she runs straight into another – the murderer, it appears, who rams her car with his van, sending her headlong into another car, killing two of the three occupants and blinding her.
Now with complete sight loss, Diana is given some help to navigate her new situation by a charity organisation who send an outreach worker, Rita (Asia Argento) to help her make adjustments. The guide dog, the white cane; these all follow. She also strikes up a friendship with the little boy whose car she hit, with the boy, Chin (Xinyu Zhang) coming to act as her de facto guide; let’s park the rather unbelievable safeguarding issues around that element of the plot, because Ching becomes rather important to what transpires next – as much as we have to wait for this to roll around.
Dark Glasses seems to be doing the groundwork for a classic bit of giallo ‘whodunnit’ but oddly, it doesn’t really go anywhere with this, as much as it’s heavily signposted in the opening few minutes. Come to think of it, aside from some gloriously implausible gore – heads seem to go off like ripe melons in this particular reality – there’s none of the double-bluffing, glimpsed possibilities, the clues, the trail which leads to possible and impossible culprits. There’s no leather gloves or masks, either. In fact, it’s made clear pretty early on who the culprit is, out of a perishingly small number of possible culprits. In this respect, it’s far more earthly than a lot of Argento’s other, well-loved works, particularly bearing in mind that he’s the only director ever to draw from me the comment, ‘Oh, come on, a CHIMP?’ So it’s less a giallo and more of a kind of pursuit film – more of a slasher then, I guess? – a pursuit both problematic and at times really bloody uneven on account of the lead character’s blindness, as she clambers slowly and unevenly away from the murderer, someone whom she already knows and recognises. Peculiar. The film ultimately lacks the exposition of your usual giallo, too, which usually unfolds some spurious, but imaginative reasons for it all, which brings me back to the chimp. We do get some wholly unnecessary water snakes in here, mind, though not especially wedded to the plot; I’d have loved it if Argento really sent himself up, adding a preying mantis, but no: it’s just snakes.
So it’s loaded with bizarre inclusions which eat into the run time, and it hasn’t troubled itself with the mystique and tension so fundamental to Argento’s best work, but hey: it’s all decently shot, the soundtrack is ferociously good, and I rather liked Pastorelli in the lead role, making the absolute best of the script whilst proving herself up to a pretty challenging physical and emotional performance; she does better with it than Asia Argento would have, had she inevitably been cast in this role – though Asia does turn up, looking rather better than she did in Dracula, and offering up a fairly plausible performance in an unusually dressed-down role for her. In essence, there are good things going on here, and this oddball collage of giallo and horror elements ticks along well enough. It may only have a dash of the gloss and flair of Argento at his best, but it’s by no means the crushing disappointment claimed by some critics and fans.
Dark Glasses (2022) is available to watch now through Shudder and other streaming channels.