Synopsis
Before tenebrae, beyond suspiria there is... Inferno
A young man returns from Rome to his sister's satanic New York apartment house.
1980 Directed by Dario Argento
A young man returns from Rome to his sister's satanic New York apartment house.
Leigh McCloskey Irene Miracle Eleonora Giorgi Daria Nicolodi Sacha Pitoëff Alida Valli Veronica Lazăr Gabriele Lavia Feodor Chaliapin Jr. Leopoldo Mastelloni Ania Pieroni James Fleetwood Rosario Rigutini Ryan Hilliard Paolo Paoloni Fulvio Mingozzi Luigi Lodoli Rodolfo Lodi Dario Argento Ettore Martini Corinne Dunne Filippo Perego
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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.
Look, I understand that this isn’t as good as Suspiria. It’s the quiet, contemplative Suspiria even though there’s a part where a guy tries to drown a bag of cats and gets just absolutely wrecked by rats and shouts “Rats are eating me!” before getting killed by a butcher who has nothing to do with anything else in the movie and just seemed excited to get to kill somebody. (New York City, baby. Best town in da woild.) If you simply compare it to a less exciting movie than Suspiria suddenly it becomes great. Those reds and purples are starting to look real good when you compare this to The Burning. Easy. If this is what your whiffs look like,…
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.
Argento is great at making girls look hot with pink and blue lighting and then killing them. Almost no plot, just vibes, has one of the all time funniest kills in any movie.
i have never been more relieved to see someone be eaten alive by rats
I loved absolutely everything about this movie. The burning colors! The gels! The ancient witchcult mythology! The remoteness of it. The witch with a coven of cats (of course, cats would serve the Mother of Darkness)! Glowing eyes in the night! Creeping dread in the rotting interstitial spaces! That soundtrack thundering!
Then quiet: "Hello... Hello... Hello..." The disembodied laugh! Corpses underwater. Creeping in the nightspace.
The staring woman in the musicology class with the best movie cat (sorry, Gustaf), a pile of Satanic fluff!
Giallo pushed into an ocean of dream! The black gloves into the supernatural abyss! The living dream of it! The pure dreamstuff miasma! How slow and floating and glacial like a dream. How it…
I'm not real sure how to rate this one. On the one hand, it's arguably Argento's most visually satisfying movie. The wild, nightmarishly vivid colors of Suspiria make a return in this thematic (???) sequel, along with a real suspense and tension in many of the set pieces (particularly the ones in the first half) that you just don't often get with Argento.
But then there's the plot, which goes beyond "comically incoherent" and into "hallucinogenic/oh god what did I take" territory. I have to assume this is intentional, though, as not only does Inferno keep switching between ostensible protagonists, none of them ever get a clue what the hell is happening.
My favorite line of the movie comes late, with one of the villains saying to the surviving hero something like "surely you've figured out who I am by now?" And the hero just shakes his head and goes "no!"
This movie is an absolute masterpiece and I’ve watched it SO MANY TIMES. Every time I watch it, different things stand out to me. At this point, I wouldn’t say “new” things because seriously, I’ve watched this A LOT. I figured for this review I would share the things that stood out on this particular visit...
When I was a kid, I used to read horror movie books all the time because we didn’t have any internet. In one of those huge books, I read about the underwater room scene and was absolutely fascinated and awed by the description and single accompanying picture. I wouldn’t see it for quite a few years later because DVD’s weren’t even around and sometimes…
every movie should look like this. and more importantly, every movie should SOUND like this!!!
Have always loved that this one is basically stripped to nothing but the surreal, atmospheric, disorienting nightmare sequencing of Suspiria. Very little attempt is made to ground characters, most of the story and exposition is either inscrutable or incidental to the situations we’re actually watching and instead, the whole thing is just a series of setpieces—all otherworldly colored lightshows and slow-burn anticipation of bloody, bodily harm—loosely strung together by the basic concept of “evil art deco building.” Ultimately the setpieces are so gorgeous and go so hard it doesn’t even matter to me that this movie is probably pure nonsense. Also always love hearing people react to the sack of cats scene, the hot dog man is a land of contrasts.
[35mm]