‘The impulse had become irresistible…’
Dario Argento, along with Mario Bava, is the Godfather of giallo cinema. Characterised by gloved killers, POV shots and stunning visuals, it’s a subgenre that rather leaves me cold, as there is little focus on character or dialogue. Tenebrae, perhaps the film in Argento’s oeuvre that best fits the giallo tag, is stylish and visceral and all the rest of it, but I’m still yet to see anything in Argento’s work that even comes close to rivalling Suspiria…
When a series of murders in Rome seem to be inspired by a book written by Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), a successful thriller writer, suspicion initially falls on the writer himself. Is this a case of life imitating art or something more complicated? Genre legend John Saxon also stars as Neal’s unscrupulous literary agent, Bullmer.
I get why people love giallo movies, and I get why people love Tenebrae (Argento himself was particularly fond of it), and yet, once again, as with many other giallo movies, I failed to connect with this one. Yes, some of the death sequences are truly spectacular; nobody shoots blood as artfully as Argento, but the lack of cause-and-effect storytelling and the genre’s disinterest in character development results in a film that looks stunning but has nothing going on under the hood. It’s hard to care about characters being bludgeoned to death if they never felt like real characters in the first place.
This was my second attempt at sitting through Tenebrae, having turned it off halfway through first time around and while I enjoyed it loads more this time, this is still not the film to change my mind on giallo cinema. I’ll keep trying. As a final note, however, I will state that the soundtrack to this film fucking rocks. If nothing else, I’d urge everyone to listen to the main theme.
