Rating A | Phenomena：14 year old Jennifer Connelly is a gorgeous angel

Jennifer Connelly's beauty is the reason why I chose this movie. When Jennifer Connelly acted in Phenomena, which was released in 1985, she was only 14 years old. Let's take a look at how beautiful she is in the movie.

Jennifer Connelly wore different styles of clothes in the movie to show her beauty.

Phenomena is directed by the famous Italian horror movie master Dario Argento. He is very good at combining erotic and horror with strong color contrast, and also uses rock-style BGM with strong personal characteristics.

The story is simple. In Switzerland, Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), the daughter of a famous actor, studies in an expensive board school and shares her room with her French schoolmate Sophie (Federica Mastroianni). Jennifer is a sleepwalker, and she is capable of telepathically communicating with insects. But she has a problem to adapt the new school. While sleepwalking, she meets a friend, Prof. John McGregor (Donald Pleasence), a Scottish entomologist, and his chimpanzee Tonga. Jennifer decides to help him to investigate a serial killer who is killing young girls in that area.

Insect brings disgust, killing criminals brings horror, and beauty brings eroticism. Phenomena used these three elements to the extreme.

1.The opening of Phenomena is a classic “Argento” while a girl is stabbed through the hand and goes to a waterfall, then she is killed by a pair of scissors and her head has decapitated by falling glass and then roll gracefully down to the waterfall.

2.The first scene of the heroine's appearance is simple but wonderful. Jennifer Corvino takes a taxi to school with the teacher. A bug flies into the taxi, the teacher and the driver feel disgusting. However, Corvino uses her hand to protect its safety.

In this plot, audiences found Corvino's kindness and weirdness, which led her to be bullied by her classmates.

I really like the relationship between Corvino and the insects in Phenomena. Insects let students discriminate against Corvino, fireflies lead Corvino to find weapons, and a group of insects helped Corvino defeat the villain at the end. Insects promoted the development of the story successfully.

3.In a scene where Sophie is being killed, the director used a narrative trick. Sophie, who is hunted in the garden, and Corvino, who is sleepwalking, are linked by montage techniques though there is no actual connection between them. They are all beautiful but fragile. The girl's scream is mixed with the rock-style BGM, which excites audiences.

4.In the second half of the film, the villain, Corvino's gentle assistant, appeared. The director designed a horrible, interesting, and reasonable transformation for the villain. In the last scene, she is gently taking care of frightened Corvino; then she becomes fierce and brutally breaks the humanoid doll. Please Observe these two shots carefully. As the personality of the villain changes, her position has changed from the right to the left. The broken doll is wearing white clothes like Corvino, implying Corvino is in danger.

5.The next scene of the movie makes audience feel sick. In order to escape from the villain, Corvino falls into a puddle full of rotten corpses, maggots, and sewage. The extreme comparison of beauty and ugliness reaches its peak in this scene. The close-ups of maggots and rotten corpses make audience extremely uncomfortable.

The extreme contrast between beauty and evil is Phenomena's biggest advantage, even now, it can still bring strong feelings to audiences. The director has made a lot of efforts to create such a comparison.

6.The traditional screenwriter technique that echoed back and forth also appeared in Phenomena, which is quite clever.

At the beginning of the movie, a chimpanzee carrying a razor appears after a young tourist is killed, making the audience mistakenly think it is a murderer, but it isn't.

At the end of the movie, The icing on the cake comes when Conneelly is saved by the unexpected hero of the movie. The kindly chimp is one of the main characters in the film and his attack on the killer is a startling sequence and one of the coolest finales in an Argento movie I've seen.

The Argento movie's old problems still exist. For example, the chaotic and disorderly editing and exaggerated performance. Every time the murderer kills, audiences will obviously feel that this is the performance. When the weapon pierces into the victim's body, the blood flowing out is also fake.

Rock-style BGM is the advantage of the movie and also the defect. The emergence of these fierce music will disperse the attention of audiences. The BGM always appears strangely, combining fierce music with the bland plot, it really makes audiences confuse.

The superficial lines are also a disadvantage. Wonderful lines should have multiple layers. The second layer is often closer to the theme of the film. Compared with Phenomena, the lines in Melody recommended before in my last article are better written.

"How long 50 years?"

"Erm...150 school terms, not including holidays."

"would you love me that long? I don't think you will."

"of course, I've loved you a whole week already, haven't I?"

On the surface, we see two children fall in love with each other innocently. In the deeper meaning, it is a kind of pessimistic emotion. Like most people, they may eventually separate.

I can't find such wonderful lines In Phenomena.

Despite these flaws, I still had an enjoyable experience watching this nearly 40-year-old film.

My final conclusion： Argento really let his imagination run wild while making this one. Phenomena is a surreal, magical, and surprisingly beautiful film, and it's a dark fairytale and a horror film. It's visually stunning and I loved the incongruity when having all this gory mayhem happen against the picturesque backdrop of the Swiss Alps.

Rating A