Giallo
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2009
Inspector Enzo Avolfi specialises in finding serial killers. In Turin, someone is cutting up and killing beautiful young women, and when model Celine fails to arrive to meet her sister, Linda, Avolfi has to help her search the city before Celine becomes another victim.
Could you have a more generic plot than that? Perhaps after finishing Mother of Tears Argento wanted something simpler to work with. Ironically, this isn’t a giallo, it’s closer to Silence of the Lambs or Seven in its story structure. We still get flashbacks to childhood that reveal motivation, but the inspector gets them far more than the killer, who has a deformed face and the rather obvious desire to deface beauty in others.
The script has nothing to it. There are several gratuitously ugly torture scenes whose only purpose seems to be to make sure we know how fucked up the killer is. Once we see him sucking on a baby’s dummy and masturbating to photos of cut up faces, it’s fair to say no more proof-of-fucked-up-ness is required. Put some story in there instead, screenwriters!
Adrien Brody played both the killer and the cop, and he also sued the producers of the film for not paying his full fee, blocking it from being released in the US. Argento has disavowed the film, saying he didn’t like the producer’s cut of it, but he also was saying at the time he felt blacklisted in Hollywood because it couldn’t get distribution. It’s a depressing state of affairs all around.