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.
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. 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. Phenomena splits the difference between these tendencies. Whereas a more overtly supernatural film like Inferno abides by an offbeat, oneiric logic pitched somewhere between fairy tale and nightmare.
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. Eschewing fussily prepared three-act structures and stopwatch-timed story beats, Dario Argento’s films unfold according to their own distinctive logic.
0 kommentar(er)
