Blogorium Review: Mother of Tears

The Cap'n is starting to think he's going to scratch Mother of Tears off of that list for next week... See, the thing about it is that while Mother of Tears is not as cheap looking and flagrantly awful as recent Dario Argento films (Do You Like Hitchcock, The Card Player), it's still not very good.

I have a hard time actually considering the film to be tied to Suspiria or Inferno, even though it makes a direct connection to the former and indirect ones to the latter. The Mother of Tears (sometimes subtitled The Third Mother) is about the final witch in Argento's triptych of stories about modern day witchcraft, following the two defeated in Suspiria and Inferno. Apparently, Sarah Mandy's (Asia Argento) parents left the Mother of Sighs (Mater Suspiriorum) weak enough for Suzy to kill her in Suspiria.

Other than the plot trying to tie everything together, Mother of Tears has nothing in common with the first two films. Other than graphic violence, there's nothing visually to indicate these films are alike, and worst of all Mother of Tears lacks any dreamlike imagery. The strength of Suspiria (and perhaps the weakness of Inferno) is the bizarre, logically twisty stories of the film, coupled with strong primary colors and dark, fuzzy imagery. They're great for watching late at night in the dark when you're starting to get tired, because the operate on the same kind of dream logic your mind goes to in rem sleep.

Mother of Tears is pretty straight forward. The monsters are never less than 100% real, the plot moves along pretty coherently (Sarah meets someone who can help her, the Mater Lachrimarum kills them, she moves on), and there's nothing bizarre or unusual about Argento's camerawork or cinematography. It's very workmanlike, right down to the truly gratuitous nude shot of his daughter in the shower.

If you're wondering "well, is it better than most of his recent output?", the answer is a tentative yes, but it's still not the Dario Argento you would expect for a story directly linked to his classics. Mother of Tears is middle of the road: somewhere between Two Evil Eyes and Phenomena, which is to say not great but better than the bottom of the pile. For die hard fans only, and definitely not up to ______ ____ standards.

*EDIT* Additional Thoughts:

1. I can't believe I forgot to mention this, but the music in Mother of Tears isn't by Goblin, but rather one of its former members, and whatever he did, it sorely lacks the "Goblin" touch. Laugh if you will, but a big reason that Dawn of the Dead and Suspiria work as well as they do are those out of left field Goblin synthesizer soundtracks. The Suspiria one is so effective with Argento's imagery that if I catch myself humming the theme, scenes like the plaza sequence will pop up in my head (remember that one? the dog?). Mother of Tears has a rather generic orchestral score with some chanting and garbage, and if I hadn't checked first, I would've sworn it had nothing to do with Goblin.

2. The ending is... I want to say ridiculous, but before we can get that far, you have to understand how rushed it is. Mother of Tears is something like 99 minutes long, including the credits. Sarah (Asia Argento) doesn't enter the coven until the 94 minute mark, and half of that scene is devoted to torturing the cop who goes in first. The film builds up some ridiculous notion that only Sarah has the "power" to defeat the mother of tears, but I'm going to go ahead and spoil this for you. Someone has to:

Sarah defeats the Mother of Tears, the most powerful witch of the three mothers, by pulling her robe off with a spear and dropping it into a fire. Then an earthquake causes the house to collapse, and somehow a spire from the roof falls all the way underground and kills the witch. Sarah leaves, but not before having a minor freak out in some muddy water filled with corpses.

This is all punctuated with dodgy cgi (like large chunks of the film) and a wholly fake looking final shot of Sarah and the somehow not dead cop laughing. I mean, okay, the way Suspiria ends is kind of sudden, but not that laughably. So do understand you're getting a lot of buildup for no reason and a sudden ending. There's a sex joke in there somewhere, but I'll let you write it yourself.