The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 5-11
Tenebre (1982)
Directed by Dario Argento
Reflexive, cerebral, bloodletting: Argento created Tenebre during one of his most inspired, distressing periods, returning to giallo after veering into supernatural horror with Suspiria and Inferno. Indeed, his homecoming seems to have many of the echoing thoughts that come with revisiting a familiar place—minus the body count. Tenebre opens with hallmark Argento flair: a pair of black-gloved hands (his own, in fact) thumbing through a murderous passage in a book before tossing it in a fire. It’s the same book, also titled Tenebre, that becomes the inspiration for a series of violent murders (even ending up shoved down one victim’s throat), embroiling and implicating the book’s author, his critics, and a small slew of others—including, you, the viewer—in a mystery of doublings, flashbacks, and veiled clues. Argento stylishly weaves a world that multiplies with complications and dark transferences, then collapses it violently, suddenly, invoking still one more more tenebrae, the Catholic liturgical service where candles are extinguished till all is dark. For Argento, the answer like the mystery, is both simple and unfathomable. Jeremy Polacek (October 7, 8, midnight at the Nitehawk)
