Aenigma (1987)

I’ve recently developed a bit of an interest in 1980s eurocult movies, especially 80s Italian genre movies. I’ve long been a fan of 1960s/70s eurocult films but I had rarely ventured into the 80s. And I’ve started to get interested in late period Lucio Fulci movies. Which is how I come to be reviewing his 1987 offering Aenigma. This was an Italian-Yugoslav co-production.

Within the first ten minutes one thing becomes crystal clear. This is going to be one weird movie. Which is OK, I like weird movies.

It starts at an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Boston. Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic) has two strikes against her. Firstly, she’s poor. Secondly, she’s unpopular. But at this school being poor automatically makes a girl unpopular. Kathy is not merely poor, she is the daughter of the school’s maid Mary (Dusica Zegarac). Being the daughter of a servant is the ultimate social faux pas. The other girls along with hunky gym teacher Fred (Riccardo Acerbi) play a particularly cruel prank on Kathy. It ends with Kathy lying in a hospital bed in a coma. Which causes the other girls even more amusement.

Dr Robert Anderson (Jared Martin) is the neurologist treating Kathy. He sees very little reason for hope. Kathy appears to have no brain activity whatsoever. She is to all intents and purposes brain-dead. Except that something is happening. It’s not like normal brain activity but it seems to be some uncanny emotional response. Dr Anderson is disturbed and the nurse is totally freaked out.

Shortly afterwards a new girl arrives at the school. Her name is Eva (Lara Lamberti). She tells her roommate that her one ambition is to have sex with as many cute guys as possible. She decides to start with Fred.

Then seriously bizarre things start to happen at the school. Bizarre fatal things.

And what’s going on with Eva? She seems odd, but in a subtle sort of way.

Then things start to get clarified. We figure out the basics of what’s going on although we have no idea how it’s happening. And there are still some more weird things that will get thrown at us.

Bad things are going to happen to a lot of girls at the school. It’s like a revenge movie, but Kathy is now a vegetable so who is the avenger?

There’s an obvious connection to Carrie, and to Patrick. Borrowing ideas from other movies is fine provided you then do something totally different with those same ideas. In this case Fulci takes basic ideas from those movies and then does seriously weird and fascinating stuff with them. It’s not the ideas that matter in a movie, it’s the execution of those ideas. And the execution here bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original sources.

This is Fulci getting seriously surreal and twisted. Aenigma is unsettling and perplexing but it’s unsettling and perplexing in a way that is original and distinctive.

The acting is mostly rather flat but that works in the movie’s favour. This is not a character-driven horror movie or a psychological horror movie. The characters really don’t matter. The one cast member whose performance stands out is Lara Lamberti (or Lara Naszinski as she was also known). It’s not that her acting is all that great but she really does manage to be disturbing and strange and that’s exactly what the part requires.

Fulci pulls off plenty of creepy scary visual set-pieces. Fulci might not have quite the artistic baroque touch of an Argento but his set-pieces here are weirder and cleverer. The visuals overall have a nicely spooky feel, but subtly spooky.

Personally I like this movie more than I like Carrie even though I’m a De Palma fan.

Fulci wisely doesn’t offer us explanations for the events in the story. We’re left to ourselves to figure out what it all means and how these things could have happened.

The movie was shot in Sarajevo.

By 1987 Italian genre directors were working on shoestring budgets which presumably explains the co-production deal. Shooting in Yugoslavia would have been a lot cheaper than shooting in Italy. The fact that it’s set in Boston doesn’t matter much. Presumably this was an attempt to give it more appeal to the American market. The movie really takes place in a nightmare world in which reality plays little part.

Fulci manages to be visually inventive and the incredibly tight budget isn’t as much of a problem as you might fear.

From what I’ve seen of his 80s work I’d say that far from being in a creative decline Fulci was just starting to reach his peak. The strange disturbing masterpiece that is Aenigma came just a year after the strange disturbing masterpiece that is The Devil’s Honey. I have to say that most Fulci fans don’t seem to rate Aenigma very highly but it’s the sort of movie that really appeals to me and I loved it.

Severin have released this movie on both DVD and Blu-Ray. The transfer is excellent and there are some cool extras including a commentary track by Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson.

Aenigma is very highly recommended.