Dario Argento's original 1977 film Suspiria is rightly heralded as a masterwork of terror. Its first fifteen minutes are among the scariest I've ever seen, and what follows is a prime example of why Argento, however flawed his overall resume may be, is considered a master of the horror mise en scene. It is all experience. Argento reels us into the darkness with him.
Luca Guadagnino wisely follows the same path with his 2018 film of the same name, though that doesn't mean he takes the same directions. It is a remake of the Argento film, to be sure, but it also isn't. It has the same plot, and then it doesn't. The characters have their parallels, and then they don't. It's a tribute to Argento's work, and then it stands on its own. One could watch both (and should), with either film first, and still appreciate both on their own.
Guadagnino's film is spiritually related, I think, to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre. Herzog's film took the well-known Nosferatu story--which began as a plagiarism of Dracula--and spun it outward to more explicitly address the complex implications, particularly about male dominance. Guadagnino spins Argento's tight 95-minute thriller into a 152-minute meditation on everything around the edges of the Argento film. While Argento ratcheted his tension up to a grisly punch, Guadagnino lets the tension sit and fester, and it never lets up.
The plot is the same, and set in the same 1977 Berlin as the original. Quiet American girl Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives at a prestigious Berlin dance school, fleeing an oppressive fundamentalist upbringing and an abusive mother. The school is run by famed choreographer Viva Blanc (Tilda Swinton) and a strange group of women. But there is some sort of malevolent presence at the school, established when one of the students, Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), flees from the school, terrified, and subsequently disappears. Susie's audition catches Madame Blanc's attention, and before long she suspects that the women of the company have plans for her that go beyond dancing.
This plot is ripe for the kind of terror that Argento did best, but Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich take it to an unexpected, though no less unsettling, place. They expand 1977 Berlin to include its political context, amid the German Autumn, RAF terrorist attacks, and the Baader/Meinhof trials. The setting of a dance school suggests a need for any kind of order amid chaos. The choreography is already set; all there is left to do is follow it. What was a malevolent coven in the original is a bulwark against oppression in the new version, with Blanc as a democratic dissenter against what could be a tyrannical takeover by the dance school's founder, the mysterious Helena Markos, who believes herself to be the reincarnation of Mater Suspiriorum (The Mother of Sighs), one of the three witches said to possess untold supernatural power.
Women possess all of the power in Suspiria, in subtle contrast to the male-dominated authority around them. It wasn't until the movie was over that I noticed that there are almost no men in it. They occupy perfunctory roles with only the semblance of fragile routine authority. The sad-looking man who stamps an East German passport. The two cops who factor into a very funny attempted interrogation scene. Even the Amish priest who delivers the last rites to Susie's mother, in a flashback, is emasculated by the mother's control over the room.
The only male character of note is Dr. Josef Klemperer (Lutz Ebersdorf), Patricia's psychiatrist, who investigates her disappearance. In scenes parallel to the dance school plot, Klemperer navigates a barren and broken Berlin, eventually putting himself at risk to save one girl. His reason for doing so becomes clear as the movie goes on; it connects to the Holocaust and Klemperer's feeling of responsibility for the crimes that men like him committed 30-odd years earlier. Ebersdorf's performance is a mask of tortured duty, a deeply felt embodiment even if you don't pick up on the trick he and Guadagnino have up their sleeves (which--full disclosure--I didn't, until I read some reviews).
The other two triangular anchors of the film are Johnson and Swinton, both of whom are captivating. Susie, merely an innocent protagonist in the original, is fleshed out into a taciturn yet brazen heroine here. Through brief flashbacks we see her fundamentalist upbringing, and how her sheltered childhood and stunted sexuality makes her appropriate prey for Madame Markos--or so we think. Johnson's performance strikes the right note between innocence and cunning, so that by the end we know a supernatural possession has taken place, but just who is the possessed and who is the possessor is left ambiguous. Swinton turns Madame Blanc into a politician of sorts, scheming to gain power within her coven, always keeping a knowing eye on Susie, treating her with a mix of condescension, suspicion, and admiration.
The women of the coven are an idiosyncratic, imposing, and often very funny ensemble, as Guadagnino embeds us in their routine of dinners, rituals, democratic votes; though the logic of it is sometimes confusing, their purposefulness always carries a sinister suggestion with it. I liked the varied personalities of the matrons in charge, particularly Angela Winkler as the stoic Mme. Tanner and Sylvie Testud as the frazzled Miss Griffith. Mia Goth is also impressive as Sara, the first dancer to befriend Susie, and the first to become suspicious of the matrons.
Guadagnino replaces Argento's traditional horror template of buildup and payoff with a constant thread of crescendo and decrescendo leading to a final conflagration. There are moments that hit hard--particularly one early in the film in which one of the more obstinate dancers meets an end that is particularly brutal, even by Argento standards--but the film maintains a quiet dread throughout, punctuated but not interrupted by moments of terror. Thom Yorke's dissonant score, reminiscent of Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood's work on There Will Be Blood, tempers orchestral order with minimalist disorder.
Of course, Guadagnino and Kajganich do get a bit big for their britches; adapting a simple fairy-tale horror film to a very real Cold War backdrop doesn't come without its fair share of pretentiousness. The big climax, though it offers a satisfying turn in Susie's and Mme. Blanc's characters, doesn't quite manage to meld the obligatory bloodbath with the more serious setup, and Guadagnino's occasional camera trickery feels less like a necessary atmosphere and more like a cover for some narrative loopholes. He makes up for this in the epilogue, which offers a subtle statement of what the film has really been about. The last shot is sure to be debated, as it seems to jostle the film out of its previous context. I think that it, in conjunction with the one shot of Susie we see in the middle of the closing credits, reinforces the power of unity in the face of walls that separate us. If Argento's film portrays a force of darkness amid a normal world, Guadagnino's concerns a formidable, though brutal and uncompromising, force of unity amid a dark world.
*** 1/2 out of ****
