Trauma

"What right has my head to call itself me?" (Polanski's The Tenant) The gag is a private Reign of Terror in Minneapolis, the guillotine is first a slashing toy amid cutout figurines (set to earfuls from Renoir's La Marseillaise) and then a portable motorized garrote. The news station gets plenty of mileage out of a wave of beheadings, graphics by the artist (Christopher Rydell) are swiftly nixed. "Can we go with something a little more stylized?" He rescues the teenage runaway (Asia Argento) from the edge of the bridge, her home is a clinic where Mom (Piper Laurie) presides over a tumultuous séance, the evening is capped by a visit from the killer. The psychiatrist (Frederic Forrest) wears a neck-brace to be on the safe side, therapy involves hallucinogenic berries to knock the doors of perception. "Look inside the head, unlock the memory, and the universe lies open like a map." Gothic depths in suburban homes, wrathful matriarchs and rampant bulimia and thunderstorms in motel rooms, Dario Argento's America. The suppressed crux is a grievous bit of malpractice not quite erased by shock treatment, the executioner tracks down those responsible armed with headlong tracking shots and hammer-blow montage. Hitchcock's Spellbound in one hand and in the other Fellini's "Toby Dammit" (Spirits of the Dead), with Caravaggio's Goliath as a mainstay in the trembling poetry of decapitated noggins that still murmur and shriek. It all circles back to the budding entomologist who follows a butterfly into the fiend's den and squishes the rapacious gecko in his hand, an active alternative to the fellow who recommends junk food and junk vision. ("I told you, you get everything you need from watching TV.") The closing credits mingle Pino Donaggio and reggae, and give a tip of the hat to Jonathan Demme. With James Russo, Brad Dourif, Laura Johnson, Dominique Serrand, Hope Alexander-Willis, Sharon Barr, and Cory Garvin.