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Dark Glasses (Film Review)

Dark Glasses - Photo Credit: Shudder

Dark Glasses is 's first film in a decade. It's a Giallo, and he wrote the script for it sometime in the '90s. At one point he gave it to a producer, but that company went bankrupt. Asia Argento probably would have been the lead at that point, and she does have a part in this version. When she was going through her father's archive recently while working on her memoir, Anatomy of a Wild Heart, she found the script and suggested that he make the film after all.

It's very much an old-school Argento Giallo, more so than a film with the slightly supernatural or fantastical elements of Suspiria or Phenomenon. It's a very routine plot for the genre, in which anchorwoman-turned-actress Ilenia Pastorelli plays Diana, a prostitute who is attacked by a serial killer. The killer's ‘modus operandi' is strangling women with a cello string. He chases Diana in a van, and she crashes into a car, after which she awakens in hospital, having been blinded.

The police investigate, but of course they fail to locate the serial killer. Diana ends up getting help from a Chinese orphan named Chin (Xinyu Zhang), whose father died in the crash and whose mother was also put into a coma in the accident. Asia Argento plays Rita, a woman who's been hired to help Diana adjust to her new life as a blind person. The killer wants to finish his work, and they hope to find him first.

You've seen this kind of thing before, but it's pretty well made. It's not as operatic as Argento's stuff tends to be, but is instead more subdued and stripped down, which may be partly due to the budget. It's also gorier than a lot of his stuff in some ways, delivering more gore rather than putting on a show with the kills. It's all told from Diana's point of view, which is also something he's not known for. The plot is not that important, it's just something to connect a string of set pieces, and at a certain point logic is thrown out the window. You've just got to go with it, and if you do, you'll enjoy it.

You could claim Dark Glasses is trying to say something about the perceived misogyny of Argento's films, but it probably really isn't. It's shot in a relatively plain way, without the visual splendor of films like Suspiria or Deep Red. The impressive synth score from French musician Arnaud Rebotini really enhances the atmosphere. 

One of the things I quite like is that Argento is heralded as a master of horror, but his films are always very precise, and while Dark Glasses may look cheaper than his other work (having been shot digitally), it's a lean and well-edited piece of Eurosleaze. It's not a masterpiece but it works. So, if you want 84 minutes of Dario Argento's greatest hits in contemporary fashion, it will do. 

Dark Glasses is available to stream on Shudder from 13th October.