Everything people praise and scorn about Italian director/writer Dario Argento are unmistakably present in his Inferno. The camerawork, lighting, and overall visual style are breathtaking and hallucinatory. On the other hand, the storyline is so incoherent that I still wasn’t sure who the main character was 40 minutes into the film.
Inferno is the middle entry in Argento’s loosely connected “Three Mothers trilogy,” a trio of films dealing with eternal witches or something. I don’t know, don’t ask me. Mark, an American college kid with an awful mustache studying music in Rome, is forced to return to New York City when his sister Rose finds trouble there. She writes to him about mysterious danger involving her building, an ancient book, and witchcraft. If Inferno‘s plotting feels particularly murky, even for the giallo auteur, it may be the result of production challenges. Argento apparently struggled with a severe case of hepatitis during filming; Mario Bava, acclaimed Italian horror director and Argento’s mentor, supposedly needed to come onset to shoot a lot of the material.
Inferno lays clam to some spectacular set pieces, including an early showstopper in which Rose descends into a squalid basement, inexplicably finds a flooded room underneath it, and then goes swimming around down there. This is not in-line with the city’s “See Something, Say Something” campaign, and the results are predictably unpleasant. That sequence, and Inferno‘s other best bits, are classic examples of the world as seen by Argento’s lens, basically an extended gothic music video of hyper-sexuality and sadistic violence. The third act is underwhelming (if not admirably bizarre – possessed, knife-wielding hot dog vendors?), but as long as you’re willing to eschew narrative conventions for atmosphere and aesthetics, Inferno is a bizarre, neon-lit thrill.
With a roomful of cats and score by Keith Emerson.
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