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The opening is a placid postcard (swaying greenery, snow-capped mountains, distant mist) bloodily rattled, thus "the Swiss Transylvania." Murders at the Richard Wagner International School for Girls, the jet-lagged American newcomer (Jennifer Connelly) rests in a blueish dormitory under a Caspar David Friedrich canvas. Hitchcock's Spellbound informs her somnambulism, an upside-down shot of her head on a pillow as she opens her eyes gives way to a barreling view of a white corridor with slanted doors. "Extrasensory perception," says the Scottish entomologist (Donald Pleasence), who uses his specimens to aid the investigation and ponders the all-important question: "What is the association between insects and the human soul?" Not Poe's orangutan but a fierce chimpanzee for this "Lady of the Flies," Dario Argento at his most abstrusely enchanted. "Screw the past," mutters the adolescent heroine during a lecture on Abraham Cowley poetry, Iron Maiden and Motörhead thunder in the halls. She reaches for a firefly and locates the culprit's maggot-studded glove and, taunted by her colleagues, summons forth a cloud of bugs like an Old Testament prophetess. Vision multiplied by insectoid compound eyes, the glass that shatters like the screen itself when a gory face breaks through. "That fly is your magic wand," in lambent invocation of Valéry's bee ("Soit donc mon sens illuminé..."). Father figures are unseen movie stars and wheelchair crackpots, maternal duties fall to Daria Nicolodi as a frau out of Dorothea Tanning. (Mirrors are covered to protect the monstrous progeny, who's revealed with a flash of Don't Look Now.) The switchblade in the primate paw, the swarm that eclipses the moon, all part of Argento's Les Yeux sans Visage and resolved in the end between fire and water. With Patrick Bauchau, Fiore Argento, Federica Mastroianni, Fiorenza Tessari, and Dalila Di Lazzaro.
--- Fernando F. Croce |