Opera (1987)

Dario Argento's Opera arrives from 1987 with the confidence of a film that has no interest in our contemporary moral ledger. A young soprano is stalked by a masked killer who forces her to watch his murders by taping needles beneath her eyes. The cast is a naturally assembled European ensemble, the kind that occurs when you hire Italians and a Spaniard for an Italian production. No diversity casting initiative is in evidence. No LGBTQ+ subtext. No racial consciousness. The film's lone thematic gesture, according to one critic, is a lament for classical art drowning in pop culture, which is a complaint about heavy metal, not an economic critique. We searched for an anti-capitalist reading and found only a man in a mask with a knife.

The feminist question requires a moment of silence. Betty is a woman in peril, subjected to voyeuristic torture, and the film offers no critique of that arrangement. It simply presents it. Body positivity is absent, as the female form here serves as spectacle and victim, not as a site of affirmation. Neurodivergence is not depicted. Climate anxiety does not intrude upon the opera house. Revisionist history is irrelevant to a giallo about a childhood nightmare. And lecture energy, that unmistakable urge to instruct the audience in proper social conduct, is nowhere to be found. This is a film that wants to shock you, not educate you.

We are left with a pristine specimen of pre-2010 genre filmmaking, a relic from a time when a director could stage a murder without also staging a seminar. The ravens are real. The needles are real. The social consciousness is not. Opera is many things: stylish, cruel, occasionally tedious. It is not, by any measure we recognize, a vehicle for progressive sensibilities. We note this without judgment, only with the fatigue of a sommelier who has been handed a vintage that tastes exactly as labeled.