Brief Thoughts On Dario Argento’s Deep Red.

I finally got around to watching the new 4k-derived restored Blu-ray edition of Dario Argento’s well-liked Deep Red last night and, well, it didn’t go very well. In fact I threw in the towel an hour in and will have to return to it later! I find Argento an interesting filmmaker (I liked his Inferno, while Suspiria remains a canonical staple of the horror genre for me), but I found this really dull. It’s an at-times beautiful looking film, and this is a handsomely presented release, but the tale being told is little more than a dreadful bore. The tropes of the Italian-produced Euro-thrillers really grate on me too, with the dubbing particularly problematic here. Sure, it’s a necessary evil of the conditions of production, but for whatever reason I’m struggling to look beyond that here.