A man tormented by the memory of a failed love and the words of a psychiatrist who considers him unstable, dedicates day and night to the search for new victims to add to his collection of corpses. Only purity of spirit can stop the Chrysalis!
“The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him.”
With this quote from “Darkness”, “Like a Chrysalis” opens, a debut feature by Luigi Pastore. A quote that is at the same time a declaration of love for the cinema of Dario Argento and a statement of intent for the work that is about to be seen. Because Pastore is a devotee of the omnia of the Master of Italian horror and in his film he explicitly wants to express the influence that Argento has had on his vision of the thriller. Fortunately, however, “Like a Chrysalis” is not and does not want to be a simple homage film, but rather uses the quote in an intelligently allusive way, managing from the outset to assume an autonomous identity and strongly characterized by personal traits.
“Darkness” told the story of a serial killer who took as a model the murders described in a book to put them into practice in reality; “Like a Chrysalis” also tells the story of a serial killer, but in a particular, innovative way. The novelty of this film lies in the absolute lack of support for the viewer, the deliberate impossibility of providing him with a reference point, a visual perspective with which to match his own gaze. Luigi Pastore, in collaboration with Antonio Tentori, writes a story in which the only character constantly on stage is a serial killer, a completely negative protagonist with whom it is practically impossible to identify. Furthermore, the killer, played by Tentori himself, is always seen from behind, almost like a character in a third-person video game that denies the viewer even the visual support.
The Chrysalis is a strange character, a killer driven by hatred for a corrupt and rotten world, a world populated by pedophile priests, prostitutes and their sleazy clients, also ready to exploit pain to make ratings, exhibitionists and kids looking for a ‘high’. The Chrysalis is a wolf in a cage of wolves, a sort of exterminator ready to eliminate anyone who dirties his presence in an existence thrown into a race towards an abyss. Paradoxically, however, the killer wants to be stopped, is aware that his mission is doomed to find an end, so he is at the same time in search of a human simulacrum of purity that now appears only a utopia.
The film is conducted with skill by a firm hand and particularly dedicated to visual sensationalism. Pastore likes to bring to the screen that ‘sense of wonder’ that unfortunately often lacks in many recent genre productions domesticated to the times and aesthetics of the syntax of television. “Like a Chrysalis” presents a choreographic refinement in the staging of the murders that reminds – not coincidentally, naturally – precisely of the Dario Argento of old. Violence often carried to excess and a spectacularization of death that has almost the erotic, exemplified by the killing of the cubist in the crowded venue in one of the most successful scenes of the film.
Praiseworthy is also the idea of inserting the skits with the puppets that tell the deeds of the Chrysalis, omniscient narrators who add to the film the ironic component and at the same time restore to the story those references to the denied childhood that form a unified framework with the story of the serial killer presented here and with the Italian thriller tradition.
Of course, as often happens in the Italian horror new wave, there are also some flaws that cannot go unnoticed. “Like a Chrysalis” suffers from narrative repetitiveness that at a certain point begins to become evident and undermines the rhythm and content richness. A chain of murders shown one after the other that flatten the interesting starting point, transforming this thriller almost into a slasher from the killer’s point of view, with the merits and demerits that the genre can have.
Good the general performance of the actors and pleasant the participation of the always excellent Riccardo Serventi Longhi (“M.D.C. – Wax Mask”; “Three Faces of Terror”) who here plays the cynical journalist. In a nice cameo in the role of himself also appears Claudio Simonetti and his band, the Demonia, to provide a musical backdrop to a bloody murder. Excellent work also in the special effects department, curated by Maestro Sergio Stivaletti, and significant work for the music, to which the legendary Claudio Simonetti also contributed.
“Like a Chrysalis” therefore results in a pleasant return to the spaghetti thriller, destabilizing portrait of a serial killer that pays homage to the cinema of the past while opening a new and parallel path that cancels the identifying gaze of the viewer. Worth seeing.
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