Dario Argento is best known for such early works as the 1977 Suspiria, the Technicolor fever dream about a young woman who discovers that her dance school is run by a coven of witches. Once upon a time, Argento films like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Tenebre promised buckets of blood oozing in a vivid, inimitable style. But since his ‘70s and ‘80s heyday, his work has been more erratic, and his last big project, the 2012 release Dracula 3D, earned generally negative reviews. In his latest feature, Dark Glasses, Argento seeming returns to his giallo roots to give us a story about a young sex worker who, after losing her sight in a deadly accident, teams up with a boy who helps her evade a mysterious killer.
As far as giallos go, Dark Glasses checks all the boxes. It’s gory and explicit, and blends elements of the thriller and mystery genres with characteristics of horror and exploitation films. The acting is a tad dramatic, and the killer dons the quintessential black gloves and mask as he murders his unsuspecting victims. After Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) is blinded in a car accident that leaves Chin (Zhang Xinyu) an orphan, she reaches out to the boy to make amends.
In what is probably one of the most bizarre scenes in the film, Diana visits the boy at an orphanage, where she attempts to convey her sympathies by giving him what appears to be the shadiest looking Nintendo Switch rip-off anyone has ever seen. Obviously, Chin is kind of insulted by this gesture (because who wouldn’t be?), but after giving it some thought, he decides she means well and that this blind woman needs his help to get around. Never mind the fact that he is an orphan, and maybe half her age. What follows is a strange cat-and-mouse game between a blind woman, an orphan and a killer, involving everything from well-trained service dogs to what must be one of the dumbest murders in cinema.
Dark Glasses is, on a basic level, quite watchable. It never really drags, entertaining enough that it holds your interest and pulls you along as you try to identify the killer. But plot-wise, it’s fairly predictable, and aside from its questionable depictions of Chinese people and the visually-impaired, the film is fairly tame, down to the graphic but finally unimpressive gore.
Perhaps this is Dark Glasses’s biggest flaw. It simply doesn’t push the boundaries of its genre or of cinema itself, alarming given the level of invention that Argento has risen to in the past. Instead, it does a very good job of staying in its lane, delivering perfunctory results that ultimately end up forgettable. If you are a fan of Argento’s films, it’s probably worth a watch, but if you’re looking for something to shock and surprise, then this movie is bound to disappoint.
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