Dark Glasses Review: Dario Argento’s Gruesome Giallo Sees Only in Clichés

Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses, the horror auteur’s first film since 2012’s Dracula 3D, features an opening scene that may be one of his most inspired creations. An as yet unnamed woman (Ilenia Pastorelli) takes a moody journey through Rome in her car, ending up in a park where people have gathered to watch a solar eclipse. Beyond grasping the paradoxical wonder of an eclipse and how it holds power over the imagination, there’s a foreboding quality to the scene, an intimation of some illicit pagan terror on the horizon. “To our ancestors, it meant the world was ending,” says someone behind the woman to a child.

Sadly, nothing approaching the strange, evocative quality of this opening scene occurs throughout the remainder of Dark Glasses, which turns out to be, at best, a substandard slasher. To get the story rolling, Argento and co-writer Franco Ferrini rely on a standard-model Jack the Ripper story about a serial killer stalking sex workers. Pastorelli’s character from the opening scene turns out to be Diana, a high-end sex worker who narrowly escapes the killer, ending up in a car crash that blinds her and kills the couple in the other car.

Argento’s primary tweak to a very familiar giallo formula is to turn the killer’s car—a white cargo van—into both a tool of his trade and a menacing signal of his presence. It’s perhaps too conspicuous a vehicle for a murderer on the prowl, but after Diana’s blinding, the contrast between the heightened visuality of the killer and his intended victim’s inability to spot when she’s in danger carries the potential for suspense, which is mostly unrealized throughout.

There’s an exploitative element to having a sighted actress play a vision-impaired character, and Argento and Pastorelli do absolutely nothing to temper the sense that they’re using Diana’s disability for cheap thrills and simplistic sentiment. Pastorelli’s exaggerated mannerisms, which Diana adopts seemingly moments after finding out that she’s blind, might constitute a bold, if still questionable, anti-naturalistic choice in another film, but there’s little coherence to the numerous artificialities on display throughout Dark Glasses.

Argento mostly hits pause on the film’s horror as Diana adjusts to her condition with the help of Rita (Asia Argento), a counselor for the vision impaired, and her new guide dog. Gradually, Diana also wins over the affection of Chin (Andrea Zhang), the boy whose parents died in the car crash. When she discovers that Chin faces teasing over his Chinese heritage from other kids at the church-run foster home that he’s landed in, Diana essentially kidnaps the boy, and after taking him home, he becomes her unofficial guide and she becomes his surrogate mother.

One might expect the bald sentimentalism of the Diana-Chin friendship to be undermined by the horrors that await them at the hands of the menace that the film often forgets about. (Argento helpfully shoehorns in a goofily blocked scene where the murderer offs some inconsequential characters to keep the story from drifting too far afield.) But like Diana’s injury, which resonates with the mysterious opening scene but isn’t brought to a satisfying completion, her relationship with the boy doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting. As the two inevitably end up on the run from the killer, the obstacles they overcome are as devoid of suspense as they are of the wicked visual power that marked Argento’s early triumphs.

Solar eclipses teach us that the act of looking can be dangerous. Characters, particularly women, must also be wary of their own vision in horror movies. Argento’s horror has often made murder into an intensely visual, sexualized event that’s often at once seductive and self-critical. In this film’s marvelous opening scene, the auteur finds in eclipses a symbol for the kind of dangerous spectacle that he’s been arranging for decades. But after this brilliantly constructed series of images, Dark Glasses gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.