There is no need for reason in the realm of the surreal...
Dario Argento's little seen Inferno is an exercise in dreams and the subconscious. The music score, the storyline, the imagery, are all one and the same here.
Basically,the plot revolves around a woman who lives in a strange building in New York owned by one of The Three Mothers, a sister of death and destruction; (her other sisters, Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Lachrymarum, reign over the the districts of Germany and Rome). The tenant's mysterious disappearance is what leads her brother to come to New York, after experiencing a few gruesome misshaps of his own, to investigate. From hereon, the plot doesn't even matter, what does is that the entire film is an excuse to indulge and literally immerse the viewer in a hypnotic-like dreamstate, as induced by the music and imagery. Argento, for one, has often been quoted as saying "I want to be loved. I want my audience to love me."
It seems that he does, in a way, try to also love us, by often assaulting our senses with his beautiful film-making, but in Inferno, we are not assaulted, we are taken under, as the underwater scenes in this film imply, and we become immersed within the beauty itself (see literal shades of this in The Stendhal Syndrome as well).
Besides the Jungian symbolism of water in this film, we are also made witness to trials by fire. It is this juxtaposing between both elements which makes this film so hypnagogic and surreal.
Besides the famous candy-coloured scenes in New York, we are also bathed in rich blues and reds, as seen here in the "Library Scene."
There is also the intruiging theme of madness running rampant throughout the story. The book of The Three Mothers becomes one of the key aspects to one of the murders, which introduces us to madness itself, the funhouse of horrors in New York, and the dangerous dementedness of the goings-on in Rome.
The ending scene introduces us to the architect responsible for the New York building. The demented architecture becomes, in itself, a state of the mind. Like the architect in Soavi's La Chiesa, he reminds us that some secrets must be left buried, forever. "We practise what some call Silencium..."
What more can one say about Inferno except that it must be seen to be believed. It is a beautiful, extraordinary, and little-seen masterpiece that will probably be better appreciated in the years to come, now that Argento's films are being made much more available for the American public.
