Phenomena (1985)

Dario Argento's Phenomena arrives from 1985 carrying a teenage Jennifer Connelly, a great many insects, and a chimpanzee named Inga who, by most accounts, delivers the most committed performance in the picture. A young American girl at a Swiss boarding school discovers a telepathic rapport with bugs and uses it to track a serial killer. The plot is giallo machinery, oiled and proudly irrational. It is also, by any measure of contemporary cultural instruction, an empty vessel. The film wants to unsettle, not to enlighten, and it holds no interest in the moral curriculum of a later era.

The casting is what casting looked like in Italian genre cinema of the period: an American name for the poster, European faces for everything else. Nobody in the film remarks on it. The protagonist is a girl and the killer is a woman, which on paper suggests a thesis. In practice this is the genre's standard furniture, and Argento handles it with his customary indifference to sociology. The deformed Patau, born of violence and hidden in a basement, is staged as an object of revulsion and nothing more. Whatever sympathy his condition might invite is never invited. The film's attitude toward bodies is the attitude of a carnival sideshow.

The swarming flies and maggots do not amount to an environmental argument. Nature here is a forensic tool and a delivery system for disgust. There is no economic critique, no racial consciousness, no meditation on identity, and no sermon waiting at the end. There is only craft: the soaring camera, the thunderous Goblin-and-heavy-metal soundtrack, the sheer conviction of Argento's nonsense. It is lurid, incoherent, and entirely free of instruction. In an era that measures cinema by its lessons, that freedom reads as a small, strange mercy.