Suspiria: Luca Guadagnino

Someone on twitter once said that Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) didn’t really have a story, plot, or characters. Instead, it was a film of architecture—of somnambulants wandering its labyrinthine dance studio, discovering rooms and corridors that can not and should not really exist. If this is true, then Luca Guadagnino’s remake is a film of dance—of ecstatic movement and rhythm, of limbs stretched and torn this way and that to unheard drumbeats from before the dawn of (wo)man. Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom have created a filmic space where the camera becomes a dancer itself, swirling in a ceaseless pas de deux with the performers as it dollies and tracks, zooms and whip pans even in moments of relative stillness. It echoes one of the story’s central ideas: that movement is an expression not just of self, but an invocation of the very forces of nature. By overindulging in stylistic camera flourishes that would make a film student blush, Guadagnino appears to be invoking the full force of cinema itself in this stunningly realized maximalist phantasm. Trading Argento’s fever-dream colors for washed out Brutalist palettes and his steady succession of gory kill centerpieces for, at most, only three moments (though excruciatingly prolonged ones) of explicit carnage, this remake seeks to transform the original film into a political fable set in 1977 Berlin, transforming the central witch coven from an army of wicked demons to a thinly veiled metaphor for post-Nazi Germany. Does Guadagnino succeed? Not precisely. His pretenses towards venerating the rebirth of a pre-patriarchy woman’s cult in the wake of the Holocaust as anathema to a national zeitgeist perforated with political violence and social upheaval have the effect of gendering Nazi war crimes—and political instability itself—as inherently masculine, erasing German women of wartime culpability. At best, this was a simple miscalculation on Guadagnino’s part, a moment of a talented director biting off more than he could thematically chew. But at worst, it’s disturbingly regressive and reactionary. Still, the film’s missteps are outnumbered by its wonders, chiefly in its back-breaking choreography (unlike the original, this one contains a good deal of actual dancing), razor-wire tension, and marvelous performances. I, for one, would not be surprised if Tilda Swinton became the first person in history to be nominated for Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actress for the same movie.

Rating: 7/10