The genius of Dariuss lies in its onto-hauntological fusion: ontology’s thrown being hauntologized by spectral irruptions, grief’s machinery grinding existence into ghostly residue. Heidegger’s Dasein, temporal and projective, meets Derrida’s specter in a dialectic where being is always already haunted—Geworfenheit as eternal return of the ghost. The family’s pre-invasion tableau exemplifies this: domestic rituals (vegetable dicing, milk bottling, candy sucking) ontologically assert Verfallen (fallenness) into everydayness, yet haunted by daughter’s Seinsende: her "RIP: Little Angel" sticker on the bedroom door as spectral graffiti, marking home as crypt. Grief here is onto-hauntological engine: loss throws the family into Angst, but specters propel regression. The wife’s masturbation—B& W mirror rotations yielding to red-leg close-ups—ontologically discloses Eigentlichkeit (ownedness) through bodily Befindlichkeit, yet haunted by portrait’s overlay: orgasm as futile projection onto ghostly futurity, Derrida’s dépense (expenditure) haunted by messianic delay. Similarly, grandmother’s lactation ontologically embodies Sorge overflowing, but hauntologically inverts to abjection: milk as spectral fluid, nourishing the living with death’s trace, prefiguring killer’s necrophilic suckling as Eucharist of the damned. Violence catalyzes this interplay: the invasion ruptures ontological Mitwelt (shared world), killer’s blade as Heideggerian Lichtung (clearing) revealing being’s fragility, yet each thrust—synced to cries—hauntologically resurrects the daughter, her wails as ghostly ventriloquism. The husband’s evisceration, bug-eyed subliminals flashing "Who is Dariuss?", onto-hauntologically queries identity: thrown into death, haunted by self as other, existence as spectral inquiry. Post-violence, quivering corpses (grandmother’s aspic-like jiggle) blur corporeality and incorporeality: ontological body hauntologized into puppetry, strings cut by absence. Metropolitana’s techniques forge this machinery: color gels (red for Eros/Thanatos, green for envious decay) ontologically tint Umwelt, but hauntologically filter specters—pink-blue domestic pastels as ghostly parodies of normativity. Found-footage grain evokes authenticity’s simulacrum, onto-hauntologically echoing Derrida’s archive fever: footage as haunted repository, preserving loss’s trace while deferring meaning.

At its core, Dariuss rejects linear storytelling in favor of a semantic labyrinth, where plot points dissolve into interpretive quicksand. The film opens with a young girl—played by the haunting Medusa S—wandering a fog-shrouded forest that bleeds into an urban tableau, complete with a crimson telephone booth evoking London’s arterial pulse. This girl, whose identity oscillates between spectral daughter, ghostly apparition, and the wife’s adolescent echo, anchors the narrative’s ambiguity. Intercut with her perambulations are vignettes of a pregnant woman (Ila Argento, doubling as the wife) slumped on a park bench, her form distorted by a slimy black membrane that foreshadows later violations—perhaps an aborted fetus or metaphorical rape of innocence. Carnival music underscores these sequences, a semantic cue to the grotesque theatrics of existence, reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s carnivalesque deconstructions but laced with Bava-esque giallo menace.

As the film shifts to the family’s Essex domicile—a dilapidated haven of peeling wallpaper and flickering fluorescents—semantics deepen through relational undecidability. The cast’s pseudonymous billing (Archibald Kane as the husband, Marie Antoinette de Robespierre as the grandmother/mother-in-law) mirrors the characters' fractured bonds: is the elderly woman the wife’s mother or the husband’s? Her lactation, methodically bottling milk amid domestic banalities, symbolizes nurturance perverted into excess, a semantic signifier of familial rot.

The husband, a spectral figure nursing candy outside, embodies emasculation; the wife, carving vegetables with mechanical detachment, hints at suppressed hysteria. No dialogue bridges these gaps; instead, exaggerated sound design—slurpy mastications, guttural coughs from an unseen child—fills the void, turning auditory semantics into a language of the unspoken. This opacity philosophically aligns with Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, where meaning is deferred (différance) across signifiers without stable referents. In Dariuss, the daughter’s death—implied through a "RIP: Little Angel" sticker on her bedroom door and subliminal baby cries—functions as the absent center, a Lacanian Real that irrupts through symbolic failures. The home invasion midway marks a semantic rupture: the killer’s POV, framed via constricting iris lenses, invades not just space but signification itself. Murders unfold in hyper-accelerated montages— the wife’s decapitation synced to infantile wails, the grandmother’s evisceration via vaginal thrust rendered in a static long take of her corpse quivering like aspic—collapsing time and causality into pure affect.

Found footage tropes (grainy textures, edge flares) evoke authenticity while underscoring artifice, philosophically echoing Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra: grief’s "real" is hyperreal, mediated through lenses that distort as they reveal. Thus, narrative opacity is no flaw but a deliberate semantic engine, propelling viewers toward philosophical confrontation with meaning’s fragility.

Philosophy permeates Dariuss not as didactic treatise but as visceral ontology, with Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection as its fulcrum. Abjection, per Kristeva, marks the horror of boundaries dissolving—the corpse, the maternal chora, the semiotic pre-Oedipal—evoking a primal repulsion that safeguards the symbolic order.

Metropolitana literalizes this in the family’s pre-invasion tableau: the grandmother’s breast milk, siphoned into bottles with mechanical pumps, symbolizes the maternal semiotic overflowing into profane excess. When the killer suckles from her severed form, imbibing this fluid amid gargling death rattles, abjection peaks—milk as life-force inverted into necrotic elixir, blurring nurture and necrophilia. This tableau philosophically interrogates grief’s alchemy: the daughter’s loss propels the family into abject regression, where incestuous acts (the grandmother’s oral ministrations to the wife, the husband’s onanistic fixation on a portrait) regress to pre-symbolic drives. Such scenes evoke Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), positing familial bonds as veiled Oedipal residues, but Metropolitana radicalizes this into Sadean excess, where taboo’s transgression yields not liberation but entrapment. The film’s dedication to Ruggero Deodato—master of cannibalistic verité in Cannibal Holocaust (1980)—reinforces this, framing abjection as ethical quandary: does witnessing depravity desensitize or awaken?

Madness, the film’s titular specter (echoed in the post-credits paean: "Madness and Syphilis Have Never Been So Good!"), draws from Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), positing insanity as society’s repressed other, a Dionysian irruption against Apollonian reason. In Dariuss, madness manifests cyclically: the killer’s invasions repeat in auditory loops post-credits, suggesting Nietzsche’s eternal return—a philosophical hammer testing life’s affirmability. Is this family’s doom redeemable, or must we affirm the grotesque as eternal? The husband’s disembowelment, intercut with bug-eyed subliminals and "Who is Dariuss?" queries, philosophically probes identity’s dissolution: ego as illusion, shredded like viscera tossed heavenward. Moreover, moral hypocrisy— a recurring Metropolitana motif from The Censor’s political satires—philosophically indicts bourgeois facades.

Semantics in Dariuss operates through a dense symbolic lexicon, where signs accrue meanings via contamination and deferral, akin to Roland Barthes’s mythologies—everyday objects mythologized into horror’s semiology. Central is the adolescent portrait: a Bava-inspired painting of a doe-eyed girl, reflected in mirrors during the wife’s red-tinted autoeroticism and the husband’s slurpy climaxes.

This image semantically encodes the daughter’s ghost, the wife’s lost youth, or archetypal innocence corrupted; its zoom-ins, accompanied by carnival hurdy-gurdy, symbolize nostalgia’s trap, a semantic black hole sucking viewers into melancholic vertigo. Bodily fluids form another axis: breast milk as nurturance’s perversion, blood as sacrificial ink (dripping title cards), semen implied in masturbatory slurps. These evoke Georges Bataille’s Erotism (1957), where fluids dissolve ego boundaries in ecstatic expenditure. The slimy black membrane—tossed like detritus in opening montages—symbolizes aborted potential, a semantic stain on maternity’s canvas, philosophically questioning procreation’s joy amid grief’s void.

Color semantics amplify: red gels bathe violations (wife’s leg close-ups, killer’s blood rub), connoting Eros/Thanatos fusion; green tints haunt forest perambulations, evoking sickly envy or ecological decay; pink and blue flicker in domestic idylls, parodying heteronormative pastels.

Subliminals—"Who is Dariuss?" over bug swarms—deploy Saussurean arbitrariness, words as floating signifiers haunting the signified. The microwaved cat, its fur singed amid "RIP" ironies, symbolizes domesticated savagery, a semantic indictment of anthropocentrism. Mirrors recur as semantic portals: the wife’s high-contrast B& W self-regard fractures identity, prefiguring decapitation; the girl’s final arm-raised supplication, bleeding eye zooming through glass, invokes Medusa’s petrifying gaze—ironic, given the actress’s name—philosophically mirroring viewer paralysis.