'Dead by Dawn' | Polish giallo | review

Dead by Dawn Official Poster

Following in the footsteps of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, writer-director Dawid Torrone has made “Poland’s first giallo film,” the gorgeously crafted Dead by Dawn. In the film, a group of stage actors and their pompous director get gruesomely murdered while staging a production in a theater with an occult past. Torrone’s film lovingly blends giallo, slasher, and occult themes into a bloody, gore-soaked pulp that goes gloriously off the rails in the third act. 

Dead by Dawn is beautifully filmed from the outset, with fluid camerawork and trippy editing meant to disorient. Locations are colorfully lit, true to giallo fashion, with excellent shadow work to boot. The location and production design is beautiful; the theater practically becomes another character. It’s clear from the visuals alone that Torrone is a fan of Italian pulp cinema, but he doesn’t just stop there. 

Technicolor-blood flows freely, with a healthy dose of kills that pay homage to the greats. An eyeball stabbing is a clear homage to the master of eye-gore, Lucio Fulci. The hacked off arm painting the walls red in Dario Argento’s Tenebrae gets its own tribute. Even The Evil Dead’s controversial tree sequence is referenced within the tight 88-minute runtime. And of course, the setting (and final setpiece) are in conversation with Argento’s Opera. None of this feels like a gratuitous rip-off; Torrone is tipping his hat to his predecessors while carving out a space entirely his own. 

The cast of characters feels more in line with those of an American slasher than a giallo film. Thinly written but likeable, it’s a cast you don’t mind spending time with, but you also don’t mind when any of them meet a bloody end. Even the “final girl,” who has premonitions related to the killings, isn’t fully sketched out. The cast is giving this film their all; it just feels like the script isn’t giving them much to work with. 

Of course, Dead by Dawn isn’t a character study, and Torrone knows it, creating a wonderfully memorable killer and some viciously gruesome kills. The killer, clad in all black and an eyeball-covered mask, is an unnerving presence throughout. It’s one of the most unique masks I’ve seen in a horror film, a striking visual presence that’s equally unnerving as it is awesome. The killer unmasking underwhelms–that mask is doing a lot of the heavy lifting–but it leads into an audacious third act that will either enthrall or alienate audience members. 

Torrone has an incredible grasp on the tone of the film, building to a borderline-cosmic third act that switches gears and fully embraces the occult themes. It’s bold, it’s daring, and has a fantastically old-school cut-to-black ending. The journey there might be a bit messy, but the ending is extremely satisfying in a “what the fuck?” way. If a typical slasher ending is what you want, you’re out of luck. What Torrone instead creates is something far more interesting. For better and worse (but mostly for better), Dead by Dawn is a meticulously crafted love letter to giallo films and all of their eccentricities.