Review: Suspiria

Why remake Suspiria? The original is so distinctive and so successful - on its own terms; if you're a fan of storytelling logic, move along - the idea of doing it over to get it right seems foolish at best and arrogant at worst. So Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) turns the original on its head: gone are the garish colours, garbled plot and throbbing sense of mystery, replaced by..., well, let's put it this way: if you're interested in office politics within a coven of witches living in a dreary 70s office block, then this is the horror film for you.

 

If that sounds a bit harsh, well... fair call. This is clearly striving for a different effect than the original, and to do so it needs to use different methods to achieve its goals. There's still a Berlin dance academy, only now the 70s setting is highlighted as the divided city is rocked by the fallout from the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The dour nature of the city is well evoked; these are people living in an oppressive place and time.

 

There are also witches, though the mystery that usually goes with them is out, replaced by the aforementioned office politics as Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) fails to take over from her decaying one-time mentor. That means the continuation of the coven's plan to find a young woman for their sinister scheme - which, if you've been watching pretty much any film about witches or covens over the last three decades will come as no surprise at all (it's basically the same scheme as in Hereditary from earlier this year).

Enter Dakota Johnson's all-American farm girl, driven to cross the ocean by a burning desire to dance for Madame Blanc and the talent to go with it. Soon she's risen to the top, in large part because everyone in her way has either gone insane or (in one case) been crushed by unseen forces in what is easily the most disturbing scene in this film. A link is firmly established: whenever someone steps onto a dance floor, the tension rapidly becomes unbearable.

Unfortunately, off the dance floor the tension barely registers. The original isn't really about all that much but it doesn't really matter because it has style and suspense and sometimes - especially in a horror film - that's enough. Here though, while this definitely has style and occasionally there's tension, the fact that it's not really about all that much is much more obvious. None of these people are real, the situation they are in isn't real, and aside from some obvious analogies this isn't about anything that relates to the real world. 

 

Horror movies can get away with that because they're machines built to scare an audience. This Suspiria though, for all its horror elements and meat hooks and sinister goings-on, never really shows much interest in actually being scary. Without that, it runs out of steam well before an extended and extremely bloody climax that feels more like a shrug than an ultimate expression of terror.

 

Guadagnino's previous films have succeeded in large part because he's a director interested in the minutia of people's lives, the way small details accumulate to create devastating moments. But here the small moments just don't connect to the big events, because this isn't a story about human beings living in a world of human rules and behaviour.  

 

It's no surprise then that the one scene that does really work - where one woman's dancing somehow batters and crushes another woman - is built around the idea of there being an invisible, mysterious yet concrete connection between them. Linking people is what Guadadnino does best: he doesn't do it anywhere near enough here.

- Anthony Morris