Dario Argento
Tenebre

An American writer travels to Rome to present his latest thriller, while a serial killer spreads panic in the city by drawing inspiration from it and killing, with perverse moralism, a series of "sinners." The writer aids the police in the investigation. As always, the truth is not what it seems, and one must delve into someone's past to fully comprehend the tragic present.

If you haven't seen 'Tenebrae' ('82), stop here and try to get a copy of the film. Watching it is obviously recommended, not only for lovers of the capital's director but also for enthusiasts of the classic thriller, albeit doused with generous amounts of blood.

For those who have already watched the film, please follow some modest considerations on the feature, full of spoilers.

Banalities, interspersed with interesting insights, have always been said about 'Tenebrae.' Among the banalities, I include the repeated mentions of the film's extreme violence (in which there are, in the end, more deaths than in any other of Argento's films; in fact, only one of the protagonists survives), the formal elegance of the product, the contrast between the shadows of the soul to which the plot, albeit not subtly, refers, and the natural and artificial light that floods the scene and the outside world, as well as the pure white clothing of some characters, meant to contrast with the shadows of their souls (consider the triangle Franciosa - Nicolodi - Lario).

Among the interesting insights, I mention the film's resonance with certain metalinguistic experiments carried out by Dürrenmatt in numerous detective novels (especially: "The Judge and His Hangman"), to which this 'Tenebrae' perhaps owes not a little in plot development: in both writings, the center of the scene is abundantly occupied by the killer, who is at the same time "actor" (or the one who moves the plot) and "acted" (or subject moved by others' designs) and thus, at the same time, executioner and victim. In 'Tenebrae,' the identification of the figures, from the second half of the film, becomes almost total, with a Peter Neal who from "victim," at least indirectly, of the current maniac's harassment, replaces him to proceed, of his own accord, to the elimination of his personal enemies (literary agent, ex-girlfriend).

At a less elevated literary level, 'Tenebrae' recalls, for the development of the narrative plot, the lesser-known "The Case of the Seven of Calvary," by the American critic and writer Anthony Boucher, in which a killer replaces another pretending to continue their work, driven exclusively by personal grudges. Similar narrative developments can be partly seen in Agatha Christie's "The ABC Murders," where the plurality of murders serves to divert the attention of the authorities from the one murder actually desired, again for personal interests.

These clarifications allow me to reach what is the heart of Argento's film: the figure of the murderer, so different from all the author's other films. While the deeds of the first murderer, literary critic [actor/acted upon] Berti, appear in line with the Argentian tradition, where the killer is essentially a sadist who "plays" with their victim, sublimating their own repressed sexual urges (see "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage," "Four Flies on Grey Velvet"), or their abandonment neuroses (see "Deep Red"), the deeds of the second murderer [actor/inspirer], the writer Peter Neal, markedly deviate from the classic Argentian tropes: the murders are expressions of violence, not of sadism; of freeing and destructive revenge, not of staging meant to sublimate a repressed tension. Do not be misled here by the reference to Neal's own past (murder committed in adolescence), which has purely narrative functions, tying back to the Argentian tradition almost as a trademark and a nod to the most faithful viewers, serving at most as a narrative device and little else.

Unlike in "Four Flies" and "Deep Red," the killer does not "play" with his victims; he does not "call" them before killing them, warning them of his looming presence and declaring his omnipotence over their fate, but rather, more quickly, eliminates them, by ax blows, strangling, or stabbing them treacherously, driven by decidedly concrete purposes. In this, Peter Neal may perhaps recall Dr. Casoni from "The Cat o' Nine Tails," who, however, acted not so much for revenge or destructive fury but for self-preservation instinct, fearing that colleagues would reveal a secret concerning him, ruining his career.

Rather, Neal's figure, in the escalation of violence accompanying his Roman stay, reminds me of Jack Torrance from the almost contemporary S. Kubrick's Shining, due to the close link between the writer's creative tension and homicidal urges: but while in Kubrick we face an artist in crisis, Argento's Peter Neal is an author at the peak of maturity and success, who decides to move from description to action, from art to practice.

In this intellectual provocation lies the authentic sinister charm of the film, revolving around the eternal question, of Greco-classical ancestry, about the relationship between art, contemplation, and life, in an intertwining that makes the viewing of 'Tenebrae' always current, and the beauty of the film everlasting.