hexafu

1977, Italy

Alternative title: Beyond the Door Il

Released in the U.S. as Beyond the Door II, Shock sees Dario Argento’s spouse Daria Nicolodi as a woman returning to a former site of tragedy, in the hope of emotional closure.

When her abusive junkie ex-husband Carlo dies under mysterious circumstances (officially labelled a suicide), Dora (Nicolodi) suffers a nervous breakdown and is admitted to a mental institution.

Released and remarried seven years later, she follows the ill advice of her new husband Bruno (classy Euro-star John Steiner) to move back into her old house, with over-attached son Marco in tow.

Upon unpacking, Dora spies a strange figure peeping out from beneath some cushions on the sofa – it is a large sculpture of a disembodied hand that seems to stir some fragments of memory for her.

Unable to nail down the memory, she dismisses it and dusts off the sculpture, adding it to the décor.

The accoutrements of the house in general indicate a more arty and emotionally-charged counterpart to her now – conventional domestic life with Bruno.

Although Dora is happy with Bruno, and looking forward to her new life with him, her attachment to the excitement associated with her chaotic former life will not dissipate so easily.

The family enjoys a few days of tranquillity before weird things start to happen – most notably to the boy Marco, who is Dora’s son from her previous marriage.

He starts talking to an imaginary friend and develops a strange hostility toward his new father-figure, accompanied by an overtly sexual obsession with his mother.

After a disturbing incident during which Marco tries to hump her, Dora avoids the issue by trying to divert his attention with a trip to the park, where they sit in on a puppet show.

Marco is enamoured with the puppet show, although Dora insists that the story – about a spirit who tries to take a living woman away with him to the land of ghosts – is too scary for him.

When Bruno returns, they have a party to settle in to the new house.

Among the guests is her former psychiatrist (the creepy Ivan Rassimov) who is still concerned about her recovery.

He is right to be: after a particularly upsetting comment by her young son (“Mamma, I have to kill you”) Dora is hurled into a distressing hallucinatory flashback involving a ticking metronome and a laughing piano.

She sees her hands playing the piano, but she can’t control them as they thrash about noisily.

This is just one example of the recurring ‘disembodied hand’ motif that permeates the film, beginning with the hand sculpture at the film’s opening.

The hand is a signifier of responsibility, and the hand’s isembodiment is the refusal of that responsibility.

She is trying to hide from herself – or repress – something she has done, as signified by the hand sculpture being hidden beneath the cushions and releasing locked memories when unearthed.

Similarly, she imagines being groped by her dead husband Carlo’s zombified hand as she is asleep in the garden.

Soon Marco’s sexual fascination with his mother becomes more violent: Dora finds deliberately mutilated photos of her and Bruno, and some of her lingerie hidden in one of Marco’s drawers, slashed to ribbons.

Her protests to Bruno are answered with medication, which he supplies to her without her knowledge.

In a sense her situation hasn’t really changed much from one marriage to the next: her first husband Carlo was a junkie who turned her onto the needle.

Bruno insists, “You’re lucky to be without him – you were living with a monster! You were only a victim!” He says this without irony, as he feeds her medication without her knowledge that only serves to unhinge her completely.

Dora takes Marco to the psychiatrist Dr. Spidini, but both he and Bruno think she is overreacting, and that Marco is just acting up as a means of getting attention.

“If you can accept the past”, says Spidini, “then you can face the future peacefully with your husband and child.”

But Dora can’t accept the past – because she can’t remember it.

Her psychiatrist’s revelation that she was administered electroshock treatment (making it especially fitting that the film is entitled ‘Shock’) answers a lot of questions concerning her amnesia.

It is not only psychological repression she is suffering from – shock treatment is a very physical mental eraser.

“That period is a complete void inside of me”, Dora says, “My mind seems to have cast it out – cancelled it completely… Only now in that house, in my house, I’m starting to remember things… it’s strange, it’s as if my own son is a go-between.”

When Dora’s nervousness starts to aet out of control. Bruno responds by feeding her more medication to calm her down, which only fuels her frightening hallucinations.

She starts to fear that her son is possessed by the spirit of her dead ex-husband, who is haunting her with accusations of his murder.

The accusations turn out to be true – Dora killed her husband in a fit, then sank into a coma remembering none of it, while the lovelorn Steiner covered up for her and made it look like a suicide.

Dora doesn’t take this news well.

“If you love me, how could you bring me back to this house?” she shrieks,

“You left me alone in this house – maybe you wanted me to go crazy!”

Completely berserk by the time of this revelation, Dora kills Bruno too, then turns a razor to her own neck, imagining it to be Carlo’s dead hand in control of the deed.

Both Shock and Bava’s earlier The Whip and the Body (1963) – and to a certain extent William Fruet’s Funeral Home – have female protagonists who murder their villainous ex-lovers and then inflict physical punishment on themselves, imagining it to be the spirit of the dead men.

Although being subjected to rehabilitation, her return to the house was a mistake that only served to ignite repressed memories.

An odd choice for Bruno, who since her release has only wanted Dora to forget about her past and look forward to a bright future with him.

Her psychiatrist also encourages her to forget rather than deal with her trauma.

So when she returns to the house, she’s not at all equipped to deal with the inexplicable fear that suddenly grips her.

Everything in the house is predatory – the furniture, the artwork, and most notably, young Marco.

The film is probably unique in its use of a five-year-old as a sexual predator, even though Marco’s erratic behaviour is later revealed to be the product of Dora’s guilty imagination.

But by imagining the child to be sexualizing her, she is in fact sexualizing the child (as is the audience), which makes Shock – and Nicolodi’s role in it – that much more disturbing.

amnesia … See all