Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I'm hoping this movie is as great as I'm hearing. The fact that it's divisive doesn't worry me. As long as it feels like Argento and isn't the pale imitation of the maestro that he's become in recent years, then I'm happy. Here's the review!
Greetings and salutations. Last night I caught a screening of Mother of Tears: The Third Mother (unnecessary subtitle) at USC, followed by a Q&A with the screenwriters Adam Gierasch and Jace Anderson. I regret to say that I had only seen Suspiria and Phenomena, but as I understand it Dario hasn't been at the top of his game since the 80s. Some are calling this a return to form, others a disappointing conclusion to the trilogy. Due to the mixed response, I went in withlow expectations, just inventive, perversely sexualized gore and a uniquely creepy atmosphere, and the film delivered. There's little need to delve into the plot significantly since his films are incoherent and that's part of their charm in a way, but the Mother of Tears, after having been awakened from the discovery of an urn, well, remains offscreen for the majority of the film. She is mostly beneath her house and is inspiring something of an apocalypse with witches congregating and people going mad and killing babies and such (which was a bit too far for me). That was the biggest weakness of the film; she's the title of the movie but we see little of her, and when we do, she's not exactly a menacing presence, just a naked hot chick having a bad acid trip. In fact the story doesn't seem to remember it's a Three Mothers movie until the last half-hour. Asia Argento is an archaeology/art restoration student connected to the people who unearthed the urn, and, whaddyaknow, she finds out her dead mother, played by Asia's mother Daria Nicolodi, who I'm assuming was reprising her role in Inferno(? haven't seen it yet), was a white witch whose ghost occasionally appears to her just to say "BE STRONG." Thanks. Udo Kier appears briefly to play Basil Exposition and connect the other two films before, well, a memorable exit. People have been critical of Asia's performances, although I thought she was quite good in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, but this is an Argento film. During the Q&A someone did ask if we were supposed to be laughing throughout the film, but I was also laughing consistently through Suspiria and Phenomena. I don't know if it was mostly the dubbed voices in those cases but hammy acting is just part of the experience and part of what makes him memorable amongst horror auteurs. The characters interact with such gleeful absurdity, yet at the same time his films maintain such an extreme tension since anything's fair game. In fact during one sequence, a band of 80s punk witches is chasing Asia in a train station, and I was on the edge of my seat because they're in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people, but you still know none of that matters to Dario. Before the film began, the screenwriters said that at festival screenings, the people who have liked the film more were the ones who hadn't seen Suspiria or Inferno. Which made the people in the audience who had collectively go "huh." What they meant was that those films had an otherworldly feel to them in their vibrant, surreal color schemes and strange interiors, and it was Dario's choice to make the background here "real world." What made Suspiria work so well for me was that you really do believe that ballet companies and schools squeeze the last drop out of every girl who comes, and they get away with that because they're preserving a prestigious old art form that deserves dedication. It was a potent allegory that contained the horrors within walls, separate from reality, and therefore invited that surreal perspective. Well, Mother of Tears doesn't have any metaphors I know of; the only intention I sensed was that Dario wanted to unleash the horrors from Suspiria and Inferno into the real world, and well, there they are, and maybe they were more interesting in contained, unique environments. BUT (!), in terms of wonky gore, this film delivers, in spades. I won't go into the gore scenes too much since that's what you'll be paying for, but the co-screenwriter Adam said that all his writing career he'd been wanting to have someone strangled with their own intestines, and nobody wanted to do that except Dario. The writers also revealed that in the final sequence of the film, Dario shot a scene in which the Mother of Tears peed on everybody from her stage and all her people drank it. Guess we'll have to wait for the DVD. So thumbs up. I can't say that all Argento fans will like it, but I recommend that they all see it. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, Jr.
