The Mother of Tears (2008)

Image credit: Franco Bellomo

WHAT'S A ROMAN URN? Asia Argento is an art restorer dealing with a deadly excavated artifact in the final installment of her director-dad Dario's ''witch trilogy,'' The Mother of Tears

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The movies of Dario Argento, the Italian maestro of gore, are lurching and awkward, full of stilted premonitions of the occult. Yet his lavishly baroque mutilation scenes aren't just murders — they're high cinematic sacrifices, flooded with what feels like the blood of pagan ritual. In The Mother of Tears, the last installment of the ''witch trilogy'' that began, three decades ago, with Suspiria, an excavated urn unleashes a torrent of homicidal madness in Rome. As a lissome art restorer, Asia Argento (the director's daughter) comes off as the sanest human on screen, which is pretty scary. B-