Phenomena (1985)

 

Director: Dario Argento

Screenplay: Franco Ferrini and Dario Argento

Cast: Jennifer Connelly as Jennifer Corvino, Daria Nicolodi as Frau Brückner, Dalila Di Lazzaro as the Headmistress, Patrick Bauchau as Inspector Rudolf Geiger, Donald Pleasence as Professor John McGregor, Fiore Argento as Vera Brandt, Federica Mastroianni as Sophie, Gaspare Capparoni as Karl, Fiorenza Tessari as Gisela Sulzer, Mario Donatone as Morris Shapiro

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

It can definitely be said Phenomena is a wildly idiosyncratic film in terms of Argento's career. It has a simple premise at heart, a killer murdering young women in Switzerland, but it is one of the strangest in how it is telling it, with nods to Suspiria (1977) and the terror of boarding schools, entomology and insects, and Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe among other details. You also get Iron Maiden on the soundtrack and Donald Pleasence with a chimpanzee assistant, and that is not even factoring in our lead, Jennifer Connelly as a young woman with the telepathic ability to communicate with insects.

She is Jennifer Corvino, daughter of a popular actor, staying in a strict all-girls school where its headmistress, when learning Jennifer has an extreme form of sleepwalking, has her strapped to a bed, examined on by a doctor, and thinks she is high on vague drugs. From here, when she is pulled into the main story, it definitely emphasises Dario Argento did not embrace logic in many of his films conventionally despite the acclaim for his earlier seventies giallo. We get to her meeting Donald Pleasence, as a Scottish entomologist who has a female chimpanzee assistant due to being wheelchair bound, by way of the most dreamlike take on sleepwalking that includes Jennifer being a "kinda" witness to a gristly murder. In context to the films which came before from Argento, I can definitely say this one is more significantly ridiculous, a film which might put people off entirely for how bizarre it is. It argues thought, whilst with their own potential flaws, the era of his films especially after the Millennium have been misread for Argento in terms of plot logic criticism, more so when he was already entering films with more tangents to them. Case in point, with Dark Glasses (2022), the abruptness with its killer and rationale for their actions, alongside having an uncomfortable real life logic to it as it involves a misogynist killer picking off random women, feels a lot more grounded next to the likes of Phenomena or Inferno (1980), though the later has a more precise structure to it. In general, Argento's films, even his giallos, have their moments that deliberately break from logic in what he clearly thought would be more dynamic and dramatic; with Phenomena, the result is broader, which may be a tipping point for many, yet I love Phenomena itself for this lack of logic and fully aware of how absurd this is.

The strange airs around it help even in terms of accidental ones, such as for when the editing choices were made for these films when distributed in their original English dubs, which make no sense in hindsight, they have ended up with passages only available in their Italian language version for the restored version. Maybe Motörhead abruptly playing in one scene is the one odd choice even for me - I have gotten to appreciate Argento's use of heavy metal in the eighties even if not for everyone, and Iron Maiden's Flash of the Blade in multiple scenes actually works well - but even that adds to the personality of the game for the better. Details in the plot like the emphasis on the "Swiss Transylvania" this is set in and the Alp air's strange effect on the people, are the type of details you normally do not get enough of in some horror films and are the flourishes, even if never part of the main plot, that add weight. They feel like tonal flourishes you get from an Edgar Allen Poe tale, apt as he is referenced explicitly in a tribute to one of his iconic stories, Argento bringing in Donald Pleasence, a great casting choice, and giving him a chimpanzee as a sympathetic character who is yet an excuse, when tragedy leads to her needing to get revenge, to have her inexplicably find a switchblade in an outside bin the middle of nowhere and gun after the culprit.

Contrasted by the washed out blue touch that permeates the film, as Tenebrae (1982) was stark in its use of septic white, the film does feel like a dream. It started off from the idea of insects and their life cycles being able to identify the time of death, which was clearly the main fascination for the script, and spring boarded into something like a fever dream. Has all of it aged well? You can argue its plot reveal of the killer, in its take on mental asylums and disability, has not aged well, but the result includes a monster child with a spike on a retractable steel stick in a boat, so the film's absurd edge thankfully undercuts any bad taste to this, alongside giving Daria Nicolodi, despite this being the time her relationship with Argento ended for good, the chance to chew the scenery for the better. It is helped by Jennifer Connelly too; she is a visibly charismatic figure who helped keep the film grounded for all its absurd turns and ridiculous dubbing readings. The scenes in the worst all-girls' school possible, leading to her summoning a swarm of insects around the building, is ethereal as a set piece, and she keeps someone there in the centre to prevent this stumbling over, as it gets weirder. That also is the case when the film becomes more morbid, as it effectively gets into a killer who likes keeping the decaying bodies of their victims like a blanket comforter, then moving to a new house leaving them behind. Eventually when we get an entire underground swimming pool of decay in the location of the finale, one of the most grotesque scenes from the director, Connelly is still there to allow a legitimately sympathetic figure in the centre of this.

Add to this the music which is not the heavy metal, scored by Goblin and as strong as expected from them, and the film has always been one I have loved even if the one, even next to the Three Mothers films with their surrealist nightmare tones, that feels the maddest and peculiar in Dario Argento's career. This would have definitely been a film which gained a greater appreciation as time went on, with the irony knowing that the weight of expectation over Argento's career would have been harsh on the likes of this and Opera (1987), also with its heavy metal tinged eccentricities, next to his seventies smashes. For me, watching Phenomena even next to some of the great Italian genre films of the era did bring up the fact that Argento had become an auteur at that point. Even if one of the horror genre, he gained a traction and a weight to his name where Phenomena, for all its strange decisions in the plot, feels like a big event production in terms of the gravitas and style filtered through it. Rather than playing safe too, he decided to make something like Phenomena, and that realization has made my love for the film grow further.