Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!
I like horror movies in general, but I have a particular fondness for psychological horror. I’ve never been a gorehound; I don’t shy away from it much, but I generally only like it when it is relevant to the plot and not just there as fan service. But psychological horror is always interesting to me because I find myself much more in tune with the people in the film. They don’t know what is happening, and I’m trying to figure it out as well. While I don’t typically like giallo films, the fact that it’s all about the psychology is a point in favor of The Perfume of the Lady in Black (or Il profumo della signora in nero if you want it in the Italian).
The movie that I am most put in mind of is something like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. This is a movie that feels like gaslighting, and that’s not a spoiler. That’s entirely the point of the film. Once things start, we’re going to spend the entire running time determining whether or not Silvia (Mimsy Farmer) is being gaslit, if we as the audience are being gaslit, or if Silvia is an extremely unreliable narrator.
Silvia works at a chemical lab in Rome and has what seems like a completely normal relationship with her boyfriend Roberto (Maurizio Bonuglia). During a casual evening, university professor Andy (Jho Jenkins) tells her that practices like human sacrifice and witchcraft are still common in Africa, and that there is are cults in his home country that target people without their knowledge, slowly driving them insane and eventually killing them.
If you think this is what is going to start happening to Silvia, you’ve seen a movie before because that’s exactly what is going to start happening. Silvia is going to start hallucinating and also seeing repressed memories. These include sights of her mother Marta (Renata Zamengo) wearing a black dress and spraying herself with perfume. She also sees her mother raped by a man and recalls that her mother committed suicide by jumping off a balcony. She’s also going to get visions of herself as a child (played by Lara Wendel) with whom she interacts.
There are also going to be some unexplained events around Silvia. She sees a vase in a storefront, which disappears a day or two later. When she inquires about it, she is told that no vase like that has existed in the store, but then it shows up as a gift. Her friend Francesca (Donna Jordan) gives her flowers which almost immediately die, but are alive again the next day. A séance lead by blind seer Orchidea (Niké Arrighi) leads to more questions than answers, as does the apparent reveal that many of the people in her life, including Francesca, Orchidea, and Roberto, are a part of a cult.
Or are they? Is this something that is happening in Silvia’s mind? How much of any of this is actually happening? It’s a question worth asking because she is frequently interacting with the visions she is having, often with clear knowledge that who she is talking to can’t be real. She has an encounter of killing her abusive stepfather, but when she brings Roberto in to help her deal with the body, there’s no body to deal with. So is she slowly losing her mind or are these things actually happening?
I liked this more than I expected to, which is always a treat and very surprising for Italian horror for me. Much of this works because, aside from a few places (no spoilers, though), there isn’t a focus on blood and gore here—the bulk of this works entirely psychologically, and it hits all of the notes well. I will always find any movie with a clearly unreliable narrator done well to be worth watching—part of the point of watching the movie is trying to figure out what is going on.
I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen another film with Mimsy Farmer, who had a career in horror in Europe in the ‘60s and ‘70s. To be fair, I have seen her work before—she worked as a sculptor after her career, and her work was used in set designs of a number of movies. Farmer is a striking presence on camera, reminiscent in appearance of Twiggy in some ways, at least in terms of phenotype.
It’s also worth noting that The Perfume of the Lady in Black contains what I consider to be one of the most unerotic consensual sex scenes outside of a John Waters film.
Anyway, I liked this a lot more than I thought I was going to. It’s exactly why I try not to have a preconceived idea of films when I go into them. Sometimes, they surprise me in the best way possible.
Why to watch The Perfume of the Lady in Black: What’s real? What isn’t?
Why not to watch: If you don’t like ambiguity, you’ll have some issues here.
No comments:
Post a Comment