Suspiria (2018)
(Google Play Streaming, December 2019) As someone who doesn’t like slasher movies and isn’t always convinced by giallo, I still found quite a bit to like in Dario Argento’s original 1977 Suspiria but wasn’t too sure how to approach Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake. As it turns out, it looks as if Guadagnino didn’t know either, because there are very few commonalities between the two movies besides the titles and premise of a young dancer joining a foreign dance company that secretly hides a convent of witches. Whereas the original’s best trait was its exuberant use of colour, this remake takes place in 1977 wintertime Berlin, with a corresponding muted quasi-monochrome colour palette. The camera is shy, the style restrained, the music almost forgettable … leading us to wonder why we’re watching this Suspiria. While the film eventually does work itself up to two frantic sequences (a superbly edited dance sequence in which the protagonist psychically inflicts grotesque contortions and physical harm to another dancer, and a conclusion featuring the highest number of exploding heads since the Kingsman finale), much of the movie is slow-moving dullness, even though there is an interesting plot once you cut away the extraneous material that bloats this film up to two hours and a half. Writer-director Guadagnino is clearly enjoying his own games here (what with Tilda Swinton playing three characters, including some you’ll never guess without reading about the film) but it remains to be seen whether the audience will follow—I thought that the 1977 Berlin framing device was near-useless even in its Nazi-of-course thematic implications. Refocus on the snappy retelling of a dancer infiltrating a coven and maybe we’d have something more attuned to my own preferences. Fortunately, I don’t get to decide how movies are made—but I do get to decide my own reaction to it, and I choose to be disappointed by this Suspiria “remake.” The high points of the film and slightly more interesting take on “innocent thrown to the witches” premise ensure that it’s certainly not a wasted opportunity, but it’s not the film that it could have been.
