The Italian horror maestro Dario Argento is an old dog (at 81) without too much interest in learning new tricks – certainly if his latest is anything to go by. Like many an Argento film before it, Dark Glasses is a straight-down-the-line giallo thriller, in which an enigmatic serial killer is systematically garrotting the sex workers of Rome. He develops an obsession with the alluring heroine, a high-class prostitute named Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), which only intensifies after he embroils her in a car wreck that causes her to go completely blind.
Blindness can be fruitfully combined with stalk-and-slash suspense, as anyone who’s seen Audrey Hepburn terrorised in Wait Until Dark (1967), Mia Farrow in the underrated See No Evil (1971) or Madeline Stowe in Blink (1994) might attest. Two of Argento’s 1970s classics already featured blind characters, but this time he puzzlingly ducks away from the Hitchcockian potential of the premise and keeps his powder dry – indeed, it never really ignites at all.
There aren’t many suspects in the mix, and long chunks of the running time are rather daintily murder-free. For its leaden middle act, the film instead tutors Diana, in stylish shades, through the practicalities of adapting to sight loss, while also rigging up a foster relationship with a young Chinese orphan called Chin (Andrea Chang), whose parents were casualties of the same pile-up.
Everything that might attract Argento’s rabid core of fans is briskly announced up front: the film does have the sinuously elegant camerawork that’s his trademark, along with a score that ping-pongs between spacey ambience and thrusting palpitations.
Customary care has been lavished on the gore effects, particularly for the first killing we see, whose victim is dragged into a bush backwards and has her throat severed, then slowly disgorges gallons of blood all over the pavement. The killer, who subsequently paints his van white to thwart police who’ve captured it on CCTV, then diverts most of his energy into road pursuits. The stunt shot for Diana’s near-fatal collision at a crossroads is nothing if not technically outstanding.
