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great film Suspiria has long been replaced by a more ordinary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.