Kathy lives in a girls' boarding school and is a favorite target for all kinds of pranks by some of her classmates. But one of the latest is so heavy and frightening that it induces Kathy to terror. The poor girl, while frightened to flee the boarding school, is the victim of an accident....
Her condition immediately appears desperate, and before long, Kathy falls into a deep coma...
While the girl remains hospitalized, hovering between life and death, frightening incidents begin to occur at the boarding school, at the center of which, as victims, the perpetrators of the vicious prank concocted against Kathy...
Aenigma is the result of Fulci's return behind the camera, after a long period of absence due to the aggravation of a bad illness (exception made for Zombi 3, from the previous year, which the director did not put an end to in directing and which was finished by Bruno Mattei.
Although the film is, wrongly, regarded as a good product, in reality this is the first in a series of films that denote a stylistic and narrative deterioration of the director. Deterioration due, in the first place, to the lack of appropriate subjects and scripts that, from the mid-1980s onward, decreed the end of horror cinema in Italy.
The story is blatantly traced to Patrick's nobler model, but in a "female" version.
Some gimmicks, to be fair, are also effective (the snail scene, and some other moments of happy visual intuition on Fulci's part), but the whole thing, unfortunately, is peppered with almost amateurish acting and a sense of the already seen that, from the very beginning, leads the viewer to the logical sequel and, above all, to the predictable ending.
A Fulci definitely far from his best creative period....
Review by Undying1
