There’s a revealing moment at the end of this sturdy documentary about the Italian film-maker Dario Argento, when his daughter Asia remembers his state of mind when he came home from the David di Donatello awards, Italy’s version of the Oscars, in 2019. Over the course of his career – which is still ongoing – 84-year-old Argento had never won a David for any of his strange, unique films, such as Profondo Rosso (1975), Suspiria (1977) or Tenebre (1982) to name just three of his best known. But that year, the Italian Academy gave him a lifetime achievement award. Asia recalls that when they got back from the ceremony, he shrugged and said “sticazzi” – “who cares?”. He only really cares about the work itself, she explains, not the acclaim it might or might not generate.
And yet this film feels eerily like one long lifetime achievement homage, packed with superlatives and fond anecdotes about Argento’s high spirits on set and his intense focus on details, such as the time when he kept checking the sewing needles taped perilously close to actor Cristina Marsillach’s eyes while filming Opera (1987). Or that the makeup department had sufficiently covered up Asia’s stomach tattoo while they filmed a scene where she lost her virginity in The Phantom of the Opera (1998) while her grandmother sat nearby on set. It’s sort of impressive how much director Simone Scafidi allows Argento’s dark side to show through all the hype about his genius.
Made very much with the auteur’s cooperation – he is interviewed on screen at a hotel where he’s supposed to be writing a new screenplay, and comes across as crotchety and querulous – the doc does a very competent job of montaging the career together in a comprehensible form. Both hits and duds are spliced and diced together neatly, like the knifework in his most violent sagas, while various collaborators from both sides of the camera think back on the old days. Michele Soavi, for example, who both acted and served as an assistant director for Argento, is particularly incisive and frank, as is producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori, with his volcanic rumble of a voice.
Rounding out the chorus of approval, fellow auteurs Nicolas Winding Refn, Guillermo del Toro and Gaspar Noé pop up to hymn their own fanboyish but insightful praise. I was particularly taken by Del Toro’s brilliant comparison between horror film-making and hostage negotiation, and Winding Refn on Argento’s talent for making a nearly abstract kind of art. One quibble though: the subtitles are poorly proofed and even someone who doesn’t speak Italian will be able to tell the translations often land quite a way from the original utterances.
• Dario Argento Panico is available from 2 February on Shudder
