Ernesto Sabato was one of Argentina’s most celebrated
novelists, winning some of the top prizes in Hispanic literature as well as
amassing huge influence within Latin America.
Publishing three novels between 1948 and 1974, it was his second 1961
text On Heroes and Tombs which is not only widely regarded as the author’s
masterpiece but in 1976 one of the key chapters Report on the Blind was
made into a film by his son Mario Sabato renamed The Power of Darkness. While the novel was a nebulous meditative
opus on life in Argentina, The Power of Darkness takes on the form of a paranoid
mystery horror thriller about an ex-wealthy man who grows suspicious he is
being hunted down by a cult comprised of blind people.
Allegorical for the Argentinian dictatorship,
the Spanish film makes its English language subtitled debut via longstanding
cult boutique label Mondo Macabro in a newly restored special edition. Although some of its signposts of State
terrorism might not come through as loud and clear to Western viewers, as an
atmospheric sensory horror comprised of foggy alleyways, dark tunnels and the
ticking of white canes on floors and concrete pavements, the dread it manages to
evoke is unmissable.
Fernando Vidal (Sergio Renan) formerly a well to do child of
privilege now living in a squalid single apartment in Buenos Aires is on his
way home when a man claiming to be a childhood friend runs into him. Fernando denies knowing him but he returns to
his apartment claiming when they were kids they used to pass their time pecking
the eyes out of birds just to see how they’d fly blind. Moreover, as punishment for their childhood
cruelties, the man believes there is a secret cabal of blind people who are
plotting against ordinary society.
Initially like anyone else, Fernando brushes it off as insanity but over
time begins seeing blind characters everywhere throughout the city seemingly
following him down subways and basements too.
Deciding to report an account of some sort, eventually taking the story
to a friend working in chemistry, Fernando becomes convinced this cult is going
around trying to recruit blind people as followers while those close to him say
he’s going mad. When his own friend goes
blind following a lab accident, it propels Fernando dark an increasingly dark
path of madness including ending up in a deserted, ethereal part of the city
that becomes almost like a Bavaesque gothic horror phantasm.
The lead performer Segio Renan as the former
dandy turned bum sojourning throughout the city is quite good and somehow
manages to convey unease at the prospect of laying with a blind prostitute in
one of the film’s more acerbic moments.
The supporting ensemble cast is also quite good though the most
omniscient supporting character is the city itself lurking with nameless blind
figures that are either real or imaginary as the film refuses to tell and only
doubles down on murkiness.
To be frank, going into
this given the boutique label’s affinity for the work of Paul Naschy and
sometimes disregard for optimal picture quality, I was leery about this Spanish
horror yarn. Thankfully however it
turned out to be a surrealist horror winner, like if you paired up the
aforementioned Footprints director Luigi Bazzoni, Michelangelo Antonioni
and Alain Resnais to concoct a most unusual Spanish horror which is ripe for revival
as an undiscovered classic.
--Andrew Kotwicki