Tom Hooper should’ve gone this direction with Cats.

Overshadowed by Suspiria on the left and Tenebre on the right, Inferno is an absurd masterpiece of visual perfection. Argento’s (and Daria Nicolodi’s) descent into supernatural insanity is everything I could want from a film that changes main characters every 20 minutes and tosses narrative out the window—taking the the time to fuck my mind with eye popping colors in every frame of every shot. I’ve often said that one day Inferno will be my favorite Argento film, and that day may be here because I love it just as much as Suspiria.

For a movie that supposedly makes no sense, every single shot is perfectly planned to the last detail by an artist who meticulously paints every brush stroked sequence with intense beauty, and with Inferno, we’re treated to a cornucopia of lecherous madness, perversely displayed in a grandiose tapestry of absurd supernatural perfection.

Friendly reminder: Don’t fuck with Witches. Ever.

100

Hallways.

"Who's there?"

Staircases and cracked doors and fractured glass, luminous and dangerous colors, candelabras and cats, too.

"Hello?"

No answer.

Argento with no context. In other terms, every image will haunt the inner voids of your mind for the rest of your life.

Inferno certainly lives up to its title by the time it finishes, yet despite all that, there definitely isn't that much going in this rather average and relatively unavailing supernatural horror flick.

It boasts the usual stylish visuals and gory Italian splatter associated well with director Dario Argento, which is no doubt a fine enough plus here. However, those distinct aspects don't quite overcome the key flaws in this as they become a lot more apparent through Inferno's drawn-out runtime.

It's not an entire mess by any means, but the film is on the unfortunate side of being thoroughly sluggish just about the whole through. Doesn't help that there aren't any interesting characters to boot, and its broken-up narrative structure doesn't entice on a sufficient level to reliably keep things going at a more steady pace as well.

A pretty immense disappointment, especially since this one is considered a thematic follow-up to the original Suspiria.

Sometimes, you see a film and wonder what the fuck took you so long. There's always an ache of regret when this happens, yet at the same time it's like restorative magick. An alchemical concoction you've had tucked away on some shelf to be stumbled upon one day. For I have now imbibed and seek the coven's embrace...

Every viewing of Inferno is a pleasure! There aren't many films that make perfect sense in their own right and no sense whatsoever simultaneously. Argento's story is carried not through logic but by feeling and sound. A curious girl looks for a key; drops her keys, then finds a key in a secret flooded room under a basement. A letter is carried from New York to Rome by notes of classic music. Time forsakes logic, spanning different periods in different places. The written word is power and books on public display become justification for murder in the wrong hands. Words pump through buildings like blood through veins. Argento's brushstrokes bathe every scene in colourful beauty. It's an experience and a work of art.

"This old building is just full of secrets like that."

Freed from the constraints of a conventional plot (come on, are any of you really into Argento's plot lines anyway?), this gets right to the meat of peak Italian horror: nightmare-logic set-pieces! There's no Jessica Harper to consistently guide us through what it turns out is the real star of the movie: an imposing apartment building, the interiors nauseatingly saturated in Argento's favored purple/blue/red and angular features hovering in the foreground. Architecture and design is often prominent in Argento, but here it even takes part in the violence with killer curtains, slicing door knobs and guillotine windows. The passageways are dangerous, and the characters should know better, but they always probe and dig and pass through doors and windows and go down rabbit holes hoping to find...what? As with most dark fairy tales, it's only ever death and loss.

The second movie in Dario Argento's Three Mothers Trilogy, and it is a worthy follow up to the classic Suspiria. While perhaps not as visually formative and distinct as Suspiria, it deepens the lore of the movies. This movie makes Suspiria a deeper experience, which is what one wants from a sequel.

Inferno is perhaps the scarier movie, where everything in the vast world of New York City can be a bad guy or a killer. Innocence is no earthly weapon, as the poet Geoffrey Hill writes in Ovid in the Third Reich. The movie is another tone poem from Argento, and it is happy to not answer questions the audience may have. It is refreshing to watch a horror movie that does not just want to scare you, and this movie does, but it also wants to beguile and entrance you.

Every sequence is a hallucinogenic hypnotic labyrinth to hell, Inferno is so dreadful and ominous yet it's oozing with beauty and grace, how?! It's a film that says "fuck you" as loud as it possibly can to cohesive narrative structure and just changes its main characters every twenty minutes, it's throws curveballs within curveballs within curveballs without giving a damn, it distorts perception so much it's unholy like those wretched witches. I loved it so freaking much!!!!!

A massive slog with only a few moments of tension and artistry

Not quite as good as Suspiria, but just as gorgeous to look at with a couple scenes that are just as horrifying.

I expected more of what they’d call suspiria’s part two but it turned out to be a lil ‘meh’. Dario, WHY do you have this awful habit of killing literally all of the characters? Maybe some therapy idk?

I was rude to this on first watch. It’s actually pretty good. Good kills, decent story. It’s a big departure from Suspiria but also a welcome one. No Goblin though. That’s a crime.

Suspiria's awkward step-brother is still fueled by dream logic, with kills that seem a little more inspired by the burgeoning slasher craze of the time. Even getting two witches for the price of one doesn't quite give this movie the same sort of production value as we had with Mater Suspiriorum. It's still a banger and a gem, and its weird world bears further exploration.

Watching this with a thunderstorm going on should be the only way to watch this

Absolutely insane and nightmarish atmosphere
Dario Argento has done it again

I was baffled by the narrative and dazzled by the visuals in equal measure.

ligando agora pra luisa mell

Mais que menina
Ela é super.
Tem mil feitiços.

6,5

Anything Suspiria can do, Inferno can do better…except for maybe the soundtrack; I still totally adored Keith Emerson’s eerie symphonic scoring here, but competing with the genius work of Goblin is no easy feat.

More on this later - I wanna revisit Suspiria before I reach any final conclusions, but based on my memory of it, I think this one is a whole lot better.