Giallo

Film: Giallo

Year: 2009

Director: Dario Argento

Writers: Jim Agnew, Sean Keller and Dario Argento

Starring: Adrien Brody, Emmanuelle Seigner and Elsa Pataky

Review:

This is one of the last of co-writer/director Dario Argento’s films that I hadn’t seen. I do recall this being on the shelf at Family Video when I worked there. It would have been out for a year by then. I recognized Adrien Brody on the cover, but Argento wouldn’t have been a household name just yet for me. I did hear that this wasn’t all that good when I started working through his filmography. Since I’m out to complete it, I decided to give this a watch.

Synopsis: in Italy, a woman fears her sister has been kidnapped. Inspector Enzo (Brody) fears it’s worse. They team up to rescue her from a sadistic killer known only as Yellow.

We start this at the opera. There are two young women, Keiko (Valentina Izumi) and Midori (Sato Oi). They are on vacation here and they’re not having fun so they decide to go somewhere else. Keiko decides to head home and takes a taxi. The driver isn’t going in the correct direction and this causes a panic. We only get glimpses of him in the rear-view mirror.

This then shifts to the airport where Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) arrives. She calls her sister, Celine (Elsa Pataky) who is a model. She is currently working but Linda has a key so she can get into the apartment. She is supposed to be home shortly, right after she is finished. Things don’t go as planned though. Celine takes a taxi while on the phone with Linda, getting off when she tries to ask the driver about where he is going.

When she doesn’t come home that night. Linda goes to the police. She hasn’t been missing for long enough so the desk sergeant directs her to the basement. It is down there that Inspector Enzo works. He has special cases and the one in particular that has his focus is on this man who is taking young, beautiful tourists. We see that he tortures them, leading Enzo to believe that he is ugly or perceives himself to be that way. The film then gives us glimpses of this killer, even filling in the backstory as to why he goes by the nickname Yellow. It isn’t by choice.

This becomes a race against the clock for Enzo and Linda to find Celine before it is too late, but Enzo’s tortured past could also affect this case in ways that not even Linda can predict.

That is where I’ll leave my recap and introduction to the characters. Where I want to start is that I can now see why people aren’t the biggest fans of this film. What shocks me is that we have the expert in the giallo film, doing a more slasher version of one, but it feels uninspired. I saw another reviewer call this an extended episode of CSI and that fits. To end the opening thoughts, this feels like a paint by numbers take on a giallo film that isn’t truly in that subgenre.

Now that I have that out of the way, I want to start with the title. This is where it feels like it is a parody of the sub-genre of murder mystery films from Italy. Our killer has a condition where he has yellow skin, jaundice. I’ll be honest, that was hard to tell when I was watching this. I’ll also include here that our killer is also played by Brody. I don’t hate that this character has rough features from his condition. Due to his upbringing and medical issues, he is bitter. He attacks beautiful tourists since they won’t be at once missed and he wants to make them ugly like him. It is a basic idea. It does fall into the perversions that are seen throughout the subgenre, so I’ll give it credit there.

Then another thing to look at is that this technically isn’t a giallo. You can make the argument only because Linda is helping Enzo, but in reality, he is doing most of the investigation. Not every movie in this subgenre follows this troupe of non-law enforcement trying to find the truth so there is that as well. I do like that Linda wants to know what happened to her sister. Celine does prolong her time when she offers a way for the killer to get away so that puts her sister at risk. These are good threads of a story that we don’t get enough of to fully work though.

I think next, I’ll shift over to acting. What is wild is that before this, Brody was considered one of those A-list actors. That fell off hard for him. I’d say here that he was solid. His performance as the killer was better to me than Enzo, but what is interesting is that they’re on both sides of a line. They’re gray characters with different forms of trauma pushing them to where they are now, but just going about it in different ways. That is an interesting dichotomy. Seigner is fine as the sister and Pataky does well at being someone who is terrified about the position, she's in. Robert Miano has an interesting cameo. I’d say that Izumi and another of the other victims were fine. The acting here isn’t great, but it works for what was needed.

All that is left then is filmmaking. This is where I’m a bit perplexed. It is hit or miss. The cinematography was fine to capture where this is set. Seeing where Yellow brings his victims was good. I do like that Enzo thinks he might know where from an image, but he isn’t completely sure. The effects that we get and the makeup look solid as well. There was one scene with Celine that made me cringe. The problem is that this never hooks me to figure out what is going on. It just feels surface level and rushes through things. The soundtrack also didn’t add much. It also doesn’t hurt the product either.

In conclusion, this is definitely a film that is on the lower end of Argento’s filmography. What is wild though is that this is still better than efforts from others still. There are good things here. The tie-in with the name of the movie to the killer was interesting. The acting here is fine from Brody, Seigner and Pataky with the rest of the cast to push them to where they end. I don’t think this is poorly made, but it just feels flat. The practical effects were still solid. It just didn’t hold my attention and I just wanted the elements that we got.

My Rating: 5.5 out of 10