340. Unsane

340. Unsane aka Tenebre (1982)
Director: Dario Argento
Writer: Dario Argento
From: Drive-In (the last Drive-In; only 4 remain overall!)

An author arrives in Rome just as women start being murdered in ways described in his novel.

A film by Dario Argento. THE END. Highly recommend. See you next time!

Okay, I am going to say more than that, but not much more. The movie has a variety of twists so going through the entire plot would 1: take a bit of time since there are many incidents throughout the film and 2: ruin the end. In terms of content, this is a murder mystery so revealing the end reveals the killer, and that’s no fun. However, in terms of presentation, this is a slasher movie. I think one of the reasons Argento was able to segue into doing horror so easily is that his giallo films, his murder/thrillers, generally have the logic of a slasher pic.

In this movie, an American author is coming to Rome to promote his new novel Tenebre. Before he boards the plane, someone steals his carry-on and destroys all the items inside it. While he’s airborne, a woman who was caught stealing his novel from a store is murdered in her apartment, pages of the novel being shoved in her mouth. The killer leaves a note under the door of the author’s place in Rome.

And things move from there. The killer is harrying the author while continuing to murder in ways that echo the novel, the police are trying to investigate despite things not adding up, and we get visions from the killer of a woman in white wearing red high heel shoes.

In the end, the movie doesn’t make sense, which adds to the slasher tone of it. If you think of Halloween or Friday the 13th, we don’t begrudge the film hand-waving questions of how the killer would have done that, we’re there to see the results of what the killer has done. The same happens here. If you start to think about the events of the movie, holes emerge, questions arise, and you’re left feeling like an explanation was added after the fact, not arrived at logically from the story’s content.

However, I found it difficult to care about those holes. Argento is the writer/director of one of my favorite horror movies, Suspiria (recently remade though I haven’t seen that version), and what’s appealing about that movie is the nightmare logic that infuses everything. Even though this piece is aiming to be more realistic, the same tone is present. A junkyard dog climbs a fence and chases a woman into the killer’s evidence dungeon. In a sense, the movie is positing a nightmarish world of violence surrounding all of us and that tone then decides the logic of the piece.

I enjoyed it and highly recommend it. It’s weird, compelling, and done well. I’m glad this is one of the final films I’m watching for the Misery Mill because it makes me feel like I’m ending on a high note.