Critics reviews

A surreal and disorienting way to spend the witching hour this weekend.

I first saw Inferno back in the '80s, when being disappointed by a Dario Argento movie meant something entirely different than what being disappointed by a Dario Argento film means today. . . . Inferno is a great pleasure for me to revisit, because it really is, as Argento goes, pretty damn good after all. One of the things that makes it good is the fact that there's barely any dialogue for the first twenty minutes.

The luscious Suspiria is rightfully lauded as his most tightly composed widescreen pleasure . . . yet upon this week’s viewing, Infernoseemed to me to be his most consistently gorgeous—it’s basically an endless series of dazzlingly colored and framed compositions, and it glides from one terrifying set piece to the next with devil-may-care fleetness.

The amused boredom aroused by the TV viewing of this cult film derives from the way Argento _alone_ has fun with it. A mannerist, he multiplies the signature effects so that every one of his images will cry out that it is stamped with the name of Argento and knows it. Red or blue filters, flattened lighting (Romano Albani), Carl Orff-style score (Keith Emerson), wild discontinuities and soft padding, red herrings and animals of all kinds. This is all pointless but not unlikeable.