«Trauma» turns 30, the horror film where Dario Argento directs his daughter Asia for the first time – Corriere.it

On March 12, 1993, “Trauma”, the eleventh feature film by Dario Argento, was released in Italian cinemas. It is the first film in which the director directs his 17-year-old daughter Asia, as well as his second entirely US production (after the episode “The Black Cat” in the movie made with George A. Romero “Two Evil Eyes”, 1990), the result of a temporary “regenerating” transfer to American soil. On the one hand, it marks a hidden need for renewal by the director, after the disappointments for the complicated production of “Opera” (1987) and a decline in popularity with the general public after two decades as the undisputed master of the box office as regards Italian genre; but also the need to reaffirm, perhaps not entirely consciously, several characteristics and forms and obsessions of his very personal poetics, starting from the subject elaborated with his associates Franco Ferrini and Gianni Romoli on the basis of one of his stories (“The enigma of Aura”) and developed with acclaimed novelist TED Klein. Minneapolis.

After the brutal murder of a nurse decapitated by means of a sort of electric garrote by a mysterious new patient, the anorexic Romanian immigrant Aura Petrescu (Asia Argento) escapes from the psychiatric hospital where she is hospitalized, attempts suicide and is saved by the television journalist with toxic addictions David Parsons (Christopher Rydell). The girl is handed over by the police to her father Stefan (Dominique Serrand) and her mother Adriana (Piper Laurie); and after the latter, self-styled medium, has held a séance for a group of residents who want to discover the identity of a local serial killer, she runs away from the house and is chased into the woods by her parents who are reached and killed by the assassin showing Aura their severed heads.

David then allows the traumatized Aura to stay with him at his lake house; and while his investigations lead him to realize that the killer seems to strike only during thunderstorms, Aura is forced to follow him to his home by Dr. Judd (Frederic Forrest), her obsessive ex-psychologist, who uses psychedelic berries makes the girl recall memories of the night her parents were killed. Aura will wake up in the hospital during a thunderstorm, when the assassin will strike again, killing a night nurse; and she will be rescued again by David when he tries to escape. Together, they will try to shed light on the events, while the serial killer will strike again, also killing the lapsed drug addict Dr. Lloyd (Brad Dourif). After Judd has attacked Aura to bring her back to the clinic and during her escape attempt he crashes his car in the trunk of which the police will find all the severed heads of the maniac’s previous victims, the case will seem closed. But the shocking truth turns out to be something else.

With “Trauma”, Argento moves into the scenarios of a gloomy and mottled America, all the stylistic features of the Italian thriller that made him a master (so much so that many American critics of the time considered the film a sort of crypto-remake of Profondo Rosso, with which he effectively more than a direct point of contact), indulging in an excellent international cast (with “cult” participations for lovers of the genre, such as the effective Piper Laurie and the always remarkable Brad Dourif); and the narrative structure of the film re-proposes in sequence the classic turning points of his most acclaimed works (the chain of crimes always filmed from the subjective point of view of the rigorously gloved assassin, the protagonists who find themselves detectives in spite of themselves, the revealing flashbacks, the false “first guilty”, the dreamlike glimpses to deform the status of reality, the final surprise coup de théâtre).

But this time it’s the general atmosphere that makes the difference, “expanded” for purely territorial reasons in a geography with less defined borders in which Evil seems to lurk everywhere, and a lower incidence of gore effects (in any case entrusted to the very capable hands of the Romerian master Tom Savini) for the benefit of a more careful composition of the suspense and of the psychologies of the characters, accentuated by an overtly autobiographical and self-analytical painful fact. The figure of Aura is in fact doubly linked to Argento in terms of “fatherhood”: firstly because she was played by her second-born daughter Asia, and secondly because she was obviously inspired by that of her stepdaughter Anna Ceroli (who died tragically the following year), sister of Asia on the part of her mother Daria Nicolodi, who suffered from the same problems as the protagonist and who appears in the emblematic closing sequence of the film (she is the girl who dances to the tune of a reggae song, a glimmer of “normality” after the horror).

And the whole film is subtly crossed, as well prefigured right from the title, by more subterranean and “lateral” shocks (such as those suffered by the very young Gabriel, played by Cory Garvin, protagonist of a chilling subplot that it is not good to reveal; or those at the basis of the motive and action of the “real” murderer, still linked to an even more remote and denied childhood): so much so that, net of its tested (and a little too obvious) spectacular mechanics, it stands out as a real and very personal investigation into the origins more recondite than the author’s own obsessions. It was not mistreated by the Italian critics, as often will be the case with many of Argento’s later and inevitably minor works; but not even caught in his painful objectivity despite an objectively unequal success compared to his own models. And, to this day, it remains a title awaiting a belated rediscovery which is perhaps the best way to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary.