Renowned American writer Peter Neal, master of chilling thrillers, arrives in Rome to promote a new novel. Soon an epidemic of shocking murders begins in the city. In a strange way, they repeat the plot of the book he has just written. Moreover, someone begins to threaten the writer himself, who is forced to start his own investigation.
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The Italian title of this film, of course, does not translate as ‘Shiver’ but as ‘Twilight’. Once upon a time, Dario Argento… Or rather, not so. Once upon a time Thomas D. Quincy wrote a sequel to his famous ‘Confessions of an Englishman who used opium’. It was called ‘Suspiria de profundis’ – ‘Breaths from the Abyss’. And in this book Dee Quincey described three Our Lady of Sorrows: Mater Lachrimarum – Mother of Tears, Mater Suspirorum – Mother of Sighs and Mater Tenebrarum – Mother of Gloom. It was to them that the goddess of newborns, Levan, handed over the child, the future opionist and writer.
Dario Argento, starting with the film ‘Suspiria’, continuing in ‘Inferno’, embodies Di Quincy’s myth of the Sorrowful Mothers. True, they became ‘witches’ for Argento, linked in some mysterious way to Richard Wagner and the occultist Gurdjieff. Following ‘Inferno’, however, he shoots ‘Tenebre’, which seemingly by its title should point to the ‘third mother’, the most macabre, according to Di Quincy, Mater Tenebrarum.
Not at all. ‘Twilight’, aka ‘Shiver’, continues not the mystical story of the three mistresses of misery, but the tradition of ‘jallos’ filmed by Argento before – ‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’ and ‘Blood Red’. What’s more, this jallo, a film about a psychopathic killer, is on the verge of parodying the genre. If the viewer, expecting Argento’s ‘Inferno’ to continue the terrifying and deeply rooted in the subconscious story of ‘The Witch Mothers’, was lured by the word ‘Tenebre’, he has been deceived, And most likely this is not even a game with horizons of anticipation, but a banal marketing move, because nothing reminds of the special style of ‘Suspiria’ and ‘Inferno’, anxious and psychedelic, from the beginning of ‘Tingle’ (let it be ‘Tingle’).
However, Argento will return to the myth of the three great witches in 2007 with The Third Mother, aka The Mother of Tears. Will this be the end of the director’s peculiar Dee Quincey theme? I’d like to remind you that the demonic, destructive femininity is exactly what characterizes Argento’s best work, whether it’s a ‘jallo’ or an aesthetic guignol. In this sense, the classic psychopathic killer is, oddly enough, a rare guest in Dario Argento’s work. The director looks at the poetics of jallo precisely somewhat from the outside. And so in this film the unreliability, the underscripted motivations and the general tawdryness seem to be the result of the paradox that almost the main creator of the Italian bloody thriller genre found his themes quite far from the canonical plots following Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’. That’s probably why he once made a blatant parody of ‘giallo’. That’s what it’s called, ‘Jallo.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (93.9 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
Subtitles
English SDH.
