2018’s Abrakadabra rides the giallo revival like an ace jockey, completing in one hour nine minutes what the likes of Amer, Berberian Sound Studio and Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses spent much more time over, packing it all in and then doling it all out atmospherically. For all its race-winning form, it never feels hurried.
It’s a gory story about a magician, told like a magician’s trick, with plenty of misdirection – “What the eyes see and the ears hear the mind believes,” we’re warned in a written preamble, a quote from master magician Harry Houdini, apparently. And then we’re off into a story about a stage illusionist whose trick goes badly wrong, resulting in a bloody death. Followed, decades later, by the magician’s son, the struggling Lorenzo Mancini (Germán Baudino), running into bloody trouble of his own on the same stage.
The coincidence of it all propels the already fragile Lorenzo into a paranoid meltdown, causing him to start doubting everything around him. This extends even to his glamorous assistant, Antonella (Maria Eugenia Rigon), Lorenzo’s go-to in a crisis. As Lorenzo’s troubled psyche rebels, it seems there is little Antonella can do as old wounds re-open, the memories of Lorenzo’s father resurface and a dance towards reckoning begins that can surely only end with the hapless magician’s death.
But never mind any of that, or any aspect of the story, in fact, because that’s not what’s important here. Mood is all, and looks, and sounds. Whatever is on your check list of giallo favourites, co-directors Luciano and Nicolás Onetti have made sure it’s up on the screen. Lurid colours, slo-mo sections, sudden camera zooms, the colour red, creaking doors, distant laughter, dolls, nudity and the suggestion of lesbian romping, sadism, ritualised death and on it goes, the Onettis tick-boxing away like the demented fans they obviously are.
What’s so impressive about it is how well it’s done and how it’s also obviously been done on a budget. It’s amazing how far you can get with a tilted camera and some canny tweaking of the colour in post-production. Which sounds like carping but isn’t. The overall effect is astonishing – as if the whole film had been shot in black and white and then tinted by hand afterwards.
There is real skill here. The sound is acoustically dead, as giallo so often was because of the post-dubbed sound (The Berberian Sound Studio’s entire plot, in a nutshell), there is a tendency to avoid dialogue and favour visuals, with many scenes assembled like a silent movie. Other have been conceived as a series of edits rather than shots.
There is some sex, though as with original giallo there’s a lot more suggested than you actually get, and the Onettis use their attractive female stars (Rigon is joined by Clara Kovacic and Ivi Brickell) in ways that Dario Argento would find familiar – all that hair, those lips, those curves – while directors Sergio Martini and Paolo Cavara nod approvingly from the giallo afterlife.
There are some good grand-guignol deaths – the one by mini-guillotine tickled me – and a final reveal that won’t surprise anyone who’s seen a few giallos.
Though they continue to work together, brothers Luciano and Nicolás Onetti only rarely co-direct (Nicolás tends to direct, Luciano often does the music and the pair of them also produce their own and other peoples’ movies) but they appear to be joining forces again in their latest co-direction, El Pulpo Negro, which re-unites them with Maria Eugenia Rigon and appears to be another delve into the world of giallo.
Will it finally get them noticed? Why do all of their films have such poor ratings on the IMDb? Where is the justice for these talented film-makers? If giallo means everything to you, Abrakadabra is definitely worth checking out. And if it means nothing, this is a great place to learn what it’s all about.
Abrakadabra – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
