Dark Glasses is the first film in 10 years from the 82-year-old Italian master of the macabre Dario Argento and is a glorious return to “giallo” thriller, but with surprising tenderness and compassion alongside the gore.
This was a script Dario wrote over 20 years earlier, and was set to direct when his producer was suddenly arrested and the project got shelved. He disgustedly threw the script in a drawer in his desk. It wasn’t until his daughter Asia discovered it and read through it and came to him and said, “Dad, you have to make this movie,” that he considered updating and making it.
The opening of the film is spellbinding. A beautiful woman driving through Rome stops and parks her car when she sees all these people in a park looking upward. It is a solar eclipse of the sun and as the light darkens dogs begin barking frantically and a father explains to his child nearby, “To our ancestors, it meant the world was ending.”
The woman is Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), and we discover she is a high-class call girl, who can hold her own when dealing with violent johns. But there is a serial killer targeting prostitutes and she barely escapes from him only to be rear-ended by his van which causes a deadly car accident which blinds her.
Asia Argento, in a lovely sympathetic role, plays Rita, who helps Diana navigate through her new state of blindness, and gets her a very protective seeing-eye dog.
Much of the core of the film is Diana’s relationship with a little orphaned Chinese boy named Chin (Andrea Zhang) who she hides from authorities at her house.
But the serial killer has his sights on the one-that-got-away and relentlessly comes after both of them.
There are elements that reference earlier Argento works. Nighttime sequences of the blind women and little boy running in terror through a dense forest (even encountering water snakes) harkens back to the Alice in Wonderland-nightmare quality of Jennifer Connelly’s sleepwalker in Phenomena. There’s definitely a nod to Karl Malden’s blind man and his love for little niece in Cat O’ Nine Tails, but there is a maturity here. And there’s even a vicious dog attack right out of Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria. One suspects the movie Argento would have made 20 years ago would be very different from the way this plays out. Perhaps it comes with Argento’s age or maturity as an artist, but there is a real beating heart beneath this brooding, elegant, mesmerizing dark thriller.
(Streaming exclusively on Shudder beginning October 13)