Eschewing fussily prepared three-act structures and stopwatch-timed story beats, Dario Argento’s films unfold according to their own distinctive logic. Despite taking a fairly realistic approach to unambiguously solving a murder mystery, an early giallo like Four Flies on Grey Velvet revels in its own loose-limbed, peripatetic quirks. Whereas a more overtly supernatural film like Inferno abides by an offbeat, oneiric logic pitched somewhere between fairy tale and nightmare. Phenomena splits the difference between these tendencies. It’s an eccentric fable about a young woman who emotionally communicates with insects that also works as a whodunit involving the search for a relentless black-gloved killer.
Soaring camerawork, insistently rhythmic editing, and the haunting reverberations of Bill Wyman’s “Valley” all combine to provide Phenomena with an almost archetypal opening set piece. A young woman (Fiore Argento) misses her bus amid the bucolic splendors of “Swiss Transylvania,” wanders into an isolated house occupied by something that desperately wants free from shackled confinement, then gets chased to a scenic waterfall where (in extreme slow motion) she quite literally loses her head over the view. Even if the rest of the film failed to live up to its promise, this would still constitute a display of consummate cinematic artistry.
Both Suspiria and Phenomena follow their dazzling opening scenes with the introduction of the film’s protagonist into an isolated all-girl environment, her arrival attended by portentous voiceover narration, which in the latter film definitely seems like a direct callback to the earlier one. In the case of Phenomena, we accompany Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), the insect-loving daughter of an A-list American actor, as she’s given the grand tour of the Swiss Richard Wagner Academy for Girls by the tightly wound Frau Brückner (Daria Nicolodi), whose histrionic aversion to the humble bumblebee definitely signals things to come.
Given Argento’s penchant for such gynocentric institutions, one may wonder whether he ever watched The House That Screamed, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s pioneering slice of Spanish gothic. What that film and Suspiria and Phenomena have in common is an unruly student body, dominated by a severe headmistress (Dalila Di Lazzaro in Phenomena), and riven by gossip, back-biting, and bullying. The difference is that Jennifer’s uncanny rapport with insects paves the way for an act of collective retaliation when massive swarms of flies descend upon the building in response to her ironic proclamation of love for her fellow students.
Argento and co-writer Franco Ferrini attempt to ground some of the more fantastic proceedings in the forensic entomology espoused by Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasance), who consults with the local constabulary on the ongoing murder spree. But all of his very scientific knowhow into rates of decomposition and the lifecycle of the Great Sarcophagus fly cannot rationally explain away Jennifer’s link to the insect world—though teaming her up with the fly late in the narrative does make for one of the unlikeliest detective duos ever committed to celluloid. Adding to Phenomena’s overarching preoccupation with the animal kingdom is the involvement of McGregor’s service chimpanzee, Inga (Tanga), who features prominently in two of the film’s most bravura (not to mention unhinged) sequences.
For the film’s second half, Argento doubles down on what Julia Kristeva calls “the abject,” the sort of noxious and nauseating stuff that “normal” films bend over backwards to evade, but that horror movies delight in rubbing right under your nose. Phenomena boasts more than its fair share: There’s a truly disgusting scene in a charnel-filled cesspool, a hideously deformed monster as well as a deranged killer, a wince-inducing act of self-mutilation, and gruesome death by metal sheeting. Precisely because the film abruptly zigs just when you think it will zag, and openly embraces narrative conceits that are quite literally bugshit crazy, Phenomena remains the oddest of odd ducks in Argento’s filmography.
Image/Sound
Synapse Films offers gorgeous 4K UHD transfers of all three versions of Phenomena: the 116-minute original Italian version, the 110-minute international English-language version, and the 83-minute Creepers cut released in American by New Line Cinema. These transfers mark a significant improvement over Synapse’s 2016 Blu-ray release, with richer and more vibrant colors, a significant increase in depth and fine details (especially in some of the darker scenes), finely tuned grain levels, more lifelike flesh tones, and deep, dark blacks.
Each cut come with several audio options. The original version comes with Italian Master Audio 5.1 surround and LPCM 2.0 stereo tracks, as well as an English and Italian hybrid track in MA surround. The international cut receives both MA 5.1 and LPCM 2.0 mixes, as well as an alternate stereo mix sporting different sound effects and music cues. Finally, Creeper receives an LPCM 1.0 mono mix. Overall, the surround mixes really open up the film, nicely separating audio effects and keeping the score (featuring contributions from Bill Wyman, Goblin, Simon Boswell, and few heavy metal songs) in the back channels to maximize the eerie ambience.
Extras
Spread across both UHD discs, the extras are drawn from earlier Synapse and Arrow Video releases. Disc one features a commentary track on the original cut by Troy Howarth, author of Murder by Design: The Unsane Cinema of Dario Argento. He delves into the film’s production history, connections to earlier Dario Argento films, and how it plays with the giallo genre, while also supplying plenty of information on the cast and crew, special effects, and soundtrack.
Running slightly longer than the film it covers, the documentary Of Flies and Maggots is an in-depth compendium of all things Phenomena, featuring a large number of talking heads (including Argento, actors Fiore Argento and Daria Nicolodi, co-writer Franco Ferrini, visual effects artist Luigi Cozzi, makeup artist Sergio Stivaletti, and composer Claudio Simonetti), as well as some priceless behind-the-scenes footage. There’s also an archival interview with composer Simon Boswell, and an Argento-directed music video for Simonetti’s track “Jennifer.”
The second disc contains a companionable commentary on the international version by Argento scholar and author Derek Botelho and film historian David Del Valle that’s chockfull of fascinating tidbits like the origins of Phenomena’s story in forensic entomology, Argento’s visit to a Swiss psychiatric clinic, the roles that Peter Ustinov and Liv Ullman were intended to play, Argento’s fraying relationship with Nicolodi, the temperament of Tanga the chimp, and some of the film’s literary and cinematic precursors. An absorbing visual essay from Arrow producer Michael Mackenzie closely scrutinizes the three different cuts of Phenomena, and goes into some detail about the lengths that Mackenzie went to in order to pave over certain audiovisual anomalies when piecing together the hybrid version of the integral cut.
Overall
It may be flat-out bugshit, but Dario Argento’s Phenomena looks uncannily gorgeous in 4K UHD, bolstered by a slate of splendid supplements.
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