Mother of Tears: The Third Mother

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You’ve seen the TV commercials

advertising erection pills, right? The ones sagely advising that, if

you still have the erection after three hours, you should see a

doctor? Well, Mother of Tears: The Third Mother — hailed in some circles as a

comeback film for revered director Dario Argento, whose career has been on a

long downhill slide since his glory days in the 1970s and 1980s

— is sort of like that. The whispering Technicolor magic of his

great film Suspiria has long been replaced by a more ordinary

aesthetic, and the scale of a beautiful, upsetting thriller

like Opera, with its famous, soaring point-of-view sequence set

inside an old, cathedral-like theater, is much reduced. It’s an

impressive show of potency — especially if you’re lucky enough to

see it with a good sound system turned up high enough that the bass

frequencies vibrate your seat — but somehow the romance is gone.

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