Opera (1987)
Directed by Dario Argento
A young opera singer is stalked by a deranged fan bent on killing the people associated with her to claim her for himself.
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Years later working as a vet’s surgical assistant, May remains lonely, socially awkward and full-blown “weird,” the latter of which proves initially appealing to mechanic Adam (Jeremy Sisto) – a guy whose apartment boasts a shrine to Argento’s Opera – until he discovers that May’s strangeness extends far past his own threshold for the bizarre.
Lucky McKee takes a look at the end of the world and it comes half-blinded before a student version of Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day and a poster-shrine to Dario Argento's Opera .
If only Wan’s film was shot in the way Dario Argento’s Opera was, a film that holds a similar tone and style, drowned in brackish grays, blues, and blacks so the crimson blood glitters onscreen.
Children are shot in the back, mothers are run down like animals, a heroic geek is tortured mercilessly, and the final reward of at least a couple of the baddies would make Dario Argento blush (indeed, a knife-through-the-chin gag from Opera is ripped off with gory gusto).
SCREENED AT THE 2008 SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: In the second scene of Dario Argento�s ("The Stendhal Syndrome," "Trauma," "Opera," "Phenomena," "Tenebrae," "Inferno," "Suspiria," "Deep Red," "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage") third film in his �Three Mothers� trilogy ("Suspiria" and "Inferno" were the first and second, respectively), "Mother of Tears: The Third Mother," hooded figures attack a woman, stab her in the mouth, slash her stomach, and strangle her with her own intestines while a malevolent monkey screeches nearby.
As time went by, the idea that the story of the Third Mother would ever see the light of day grew increasingly remote, especially as Argento's reputation took a hefty fall in the early '90s (for myself, I had not previously seen any of his films later than 1987's Opera , and I must take it on faith that they really are as silly and flaccid as is typically claimed).
The whispering Technicolor magic of his great film Suspiria has long been replaced by a more ordinary aesthetic, and the scale of a beautiful, upsetting thriller like Opera, with its famous, soaring point-of-view sequence set inside an old, cathedral-like theater, is much reduced.