Opera (film)

Plot

When Mara Cecova, the arrogant and ill-tempered star of an avant-garde production of Verdi's Macbeth at the Parma Opera House, is injured after getting hit by a car outside the theater during an argument with the director, Cecova's young understudy, Betty (Cristina Marsillach), is informed of the incident and is given the coveted role of Lady Macbeth. In spite of her initial sense of foreboding, Betty is an instant success with her performance.

However, an anonymous figure finds his way into the opera house on the opening night, watching Betty's performance from an empty box. When a stagehand finds him, the man murders him by impaling him on a coat-hook.

While at her boyfriend Stefano's (William McNamara) apartment, the unseen assailant breaks in and attacks and overpowers Betty. He gags her with tape, ties her to a pillar and forces her to watch him kill Stefano, taping a row of needles beneath each of her eyes to ensure she sees every horrific detail. Afterwards, the hooded, masked killer unties Betty and flees the apartment. Disturbed by a half-hidden childhood recollection of the same hooded killer murdering her own mother several years earlier, Betty chooses not to go to the police and instead confides in her director, Marco (Ian Charleson) that the killer may know her.

The next day, Police Inspector Alan Santini (Urbano Barberini) arrives at the opera house where he questions the staff about Stefano's murder as well as an apparently connected attack on the troubled production's pet ravens, three of which were found dead after the show. Betty arrives at the opera house for rehearsals, but avoids Santini, hiding in her dressing room, where she calls her agent, the motherly Mira (Daria Nicolodi), for advice on her situation.

Later that day, after her costume is found slashed to ribbons, Betty meets with the wardrobe seamstress, Giulia (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni). While repairing the dress, Giulia finds a gold bracelet sewn onto it. While Betty and Giulia try to find what the faded words on the bracelet say, the killer intervenes, once again tying Betty up, gagging her with tape and taping needles under her eyes. He then attacks Giulia in order to retrieve the bracelet. Bleeding to death from stab wounds, Giulia inadvertently swallows the bracelet with her dying breath, forcing the assailant to cut her throat open in order to retrieve it. The assailant unties Betty and flees.

When Betty flees to her apartment, she is met in the lobby by Inspector Santini and tells him about the latest murder and that the killer may be after her. Santini promises to send Betty a detective to keep guard over her. While Betty struggles with her vision after applying eye drops, a man identifying himself as Inspector Soavi arrives to look after her. Some time later, Mira arrives and tells Betty that she talked with a man in the lobby claiming to be Inspector Soavi. Unsure of which one is the impostor, Betty and Mira hide while the figure claiming to be Soavi receives a phone call and leaves the apartment. While Betty tries to call the police, Mira hears a knock on the front door. Mira demands the visitor identify himself, and is not convinced when he shows police ID and a gun. As she looks through the peep hole, she is shot in the head and killed. Betty is forced to hide as the killer breaks in, and she comes across the real Inspector Soavi (Michele Soavi), who stumbles into the apartment after being fatally stabbed. After a game of cat-and-mouse in the apartment with the half-blind Betty trading gunshots at the hooded killer with Soavi's gun, she escapes through a ventilation shaft when a little neighbor girl helps her escape into her apartment down the hallway.

Betty returns to the opera house and meets with Marco. He tells her that he has a plan to entrap the killer, while Betty begins to think about a further connection to the killer and her long-dead abusive mother.

The following night, Betty once again takes the stage as Lady Macbeth, but her performance is interrupted when Marco unleashes a flock of vengeful ravens into the audience. Recognizing the face of their attacker from the previous night, the birds swoop down on him sitting in the audience, gouging out one of his eyes. The murderer, who is revealed to be Inspector Santini, attempts to shoot at Betty on stage, but she evades the bullets, while Santini evades capture, and subsequently pounces on Betty as she is recovering in her dressing room.

Dragging her to a far-flung corner of the building, he reveals to her the motive behind his persecution of her: Santini was once her mother's young teenage lover, cruelly murdering young women at Betty's mother's behest, by tying them up and staging the killings in front of her. But when Betty's psycho mother became increasingly greedy for more sado-sexual thrills from the murders, Santini murdered her too, while Betty witnessed the event from behind a partly open door. Now, many years later, Santini's desire to kill has been rekindled by Betty's appearance, which he sees as her mother's reincarnation. Blindfolding Betty and tying her to a chair, Santini stages his own death by setting fire to the room and apparently himself. Betty manages to break free and escapes from the blaze to be comforted by Marco.

Betty and Marco leave Rome, traveling to the Swiss Alps to a house that Marco owns so she can recuperate. However, when he hears a radio broadcast that the man thought to have been burned alive was not Santini but a clothed mannequin, Marco yells for Betty to run away. Santini shows up at the house to finish what he started and murders the housekeeper. Betty flees into the nearby woods with Santini in pursuit. Marco tackles him, only to be stabbed to death. Betty distracts Santini by coming onto him, long enough to bash him on the head with a rock, whereupon the police arrive to take him away. Traumatized by her nightmarish experience, Betty wanders though an empty meadow to find solace in nature. Finding a lizard trapped in the grass, Betty frees it and tells it to "go free".

Cast

Production

Dario Argento based the movie on his experiences directing a failed production of Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth, with Ian Charleson's character of Marco being based on Argento himself. The plot device of needles taped under the eye (an image featured prominently in the film's promotional campaign), came from a joke of Argento's. The director said it would annoy him when people would look away during the scary scenes in his films, and jokingly suggested taping pins under people's eyes so they couldn't look away from the film. The role of Signora Mara Cecova was written with Vanessa Redgrave in mind. When she proved to be unavailable, the character's scenes were greatly reduced.

Actress Daria Nicolodi originally did not want to play the role of Mira, having recently ended her long-time relationship with Argento. What finally convinced her to take the role was the character's elaborate and shocking death scene. She would later say that filming her death scene was tremendously frightening as it required her to have a small amount of explosive placed on the back of her head. The role of Inspector Daniele Soavi was played by the character's namesake, Argento's long-time collaborator Michele Soavi, in an uncredited role. This was the final film of actor Ian Charleson, who tested positive for HIV after a minor car accident, something which he had suspected for several months. He died two years after the film's release.

The film's American release by Orion Pictures had eleven minutes removed, including a subplot involving a little girl who befriends Betty and her abusive mother which triggers the latter's recollections of her own mother. In the United Kingdom, 47 seconds of violence were cut. These were restored in the 2002 DVD release. During a promotional screening at the Cannes Film Festival, several audience members criticized the poor quality of actor Urbano Barberini's voice. As such, his lines were re-dubbed prior the film's English-language release.

The eponymous opera house is the Teatro Regio in Parma, Italy, one of the film's primary filming locations.

Critical reception

Opera currently has an approval rating of 83% on movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on twelve reviews. AllMovie called the film "a decent, fairly typical Argento film that is worth watching primarily for its above-average murder sequences."