How does one go from a tender coming-of-age tale of self-discovery, to a horrific descent into supernatural chaos? If Call Me By Your Name revealed Luca Guadagnino at his most sentimental and vulnerable, Suspiria brings out his righteous anger at the world, and its relentless amnesia. Forget everything you know about the original.
The film follows Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), a young Ohioan who’s always had her sights set on Berlin. She arrives there in 1977, after leaving her Mennonite (somewhat similar to the Amish) family back in the States. Despite her lack of formal training, she has come to audition for the über prestigious Morkos Dance Academy, an all-female company renowned worldwide.
After triumphing in her audition, Susie’s anxiety swiftly fades away as the academy’s ominous walls begin to grow on her. It helps that Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) has taken her up as her protégé. But all is not right with the academy and its members. A former dancer, Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is missing, and her therapist is trying to find her. After convincing Patricia’s friend, Sara (Mia Goth) to help him, the two begin to grasp the true of horror what lies beneath the façade of the Academy.
A Shape Shifting Dance
Defining Suspiria in terms of genre is a bit tricky. The form, with its unsettling ambiance and suffocating score, screams horror, but the film itself has no interest in making you cry out. Instead, it seeks to get under your skin, intimately and irreversibly. Though the film isn’t as overtly personal as some of Guadagnino’s past work, it is rooted in a terrifying anxiety that is as specific to the German 70’s as much as it is to the American present.
This can be best summarized when Susie chillingly asks Madame Blanc: “Why is everyone so ready to think the worst is over?” As sincere as it is rhetorical, and as melancholic as it is threatening, Susie’s question cuts right into the heart of Suspiria. But more importantly, it implicates the audience, beckoning them to look back at themselves, and their past which they so often consider a closed and done book.
The past, both ancient and near, is an ever-present specter in the film, as is Berlin itself. Though most of the film takes place firmly indoors, with barely a few short scenes on the street, the city lingers like an ominous shadow, a bloody elephant in every room. Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich’s specific choice to change the story to West Berlin, but remain in 1977 is a deeply intelligent one, landing our characters smack in the middle of the “German Autumn,” a term used for the particularly tumultuous time that characterized the late months of that year, the height of extremist left-wing militancy, like that of the RAF, whose actions and aura the film constantly references. The Academy acts as an extension of Berlin as a sight of catastrophe and trauma, both self-inflicted and foreign, but also surpasses its host city as a larger than life structure that calls to the light all collective human efforts to sanitize history.
As such, the film’s grotesque deaths and over-the-top gore make sense in its spatial and thematic context. Though lumped in with the “art film” market by virtue of its director and distribution, the film more often feels like a polished grindhouse flick that’s more overt in its political and cultural reflexivity. Though the violence doesn’t really frighten in the conventional sense a horror film might, it will have your hand reaching for your mouth, especially more towards the end when Guadagnino takes a very visceral approach to the phrase “all hell breaks loose.”
Grotesque Aesthetics
In fact, much of the deep discomfort that one is bound to get from this film is in large part due to the chaos of its events infesting its very cinematography and editing. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s camera is erratic, often even irrational, jolting from one contorted or leering face to the next at breakneck speed, pulling out all the stops, from dramatic zooms to distorted slow motion. Walter Fasano’s rapid, and often deliberately inconsistent, editing style also adds to the distorting and alienating experience of the film, and helps maintain its potent sense of dread.
It’s particularly interesting that the film never succeeds at establishing and maintaining this sense without teasing out the mystery for very long. Before the first third is over, we get the basic gist of what is going on and the rest of the plot is simply a matter of consequences. This is a smart choice given that many who’ll be drawn to the film will be familiar with Dario Argento’s original 1977 Suspiria, if not outright fans. By getting the secret out in the open so quickly, Guadagnino sabotages any attempt to compare his vision with its source material. His reworking of the original’s plot, themes and aesthetics is a masterclass in how, and why, to remake a film, especially when it’s already been successful.
Moreover, by exposing the most pertinent plot question early on, the film asks us to divert our attention to its characters, and all the mind games they play on each other. Though the entire cast is phenomenal, Johnson and Swinton shine in particular in their first, hopefully far from last, reunion since Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash a couple of years back. Swinton is, of course, no novice when it comes to owning her spatial presence and diffusing her characters in the subtlest of physical expressions, so it’s Johnson who delightfully surprises by going head-to-head with her, and keeping up all the way through.
In addition to the fact that her talent has now become unquestionable, Johnson was an especially terrific choice for Susie given the somewhat shy and timid characters she’s often typecast in (think the Fifty Shades trilogy, or How to be Single). The film baits us with these expectations, only to bring them down on our heads in the horrifying end.
Suspiria: Conclusion
Though it may seem odd, at face value, to think of Susie and Elio’s stories as peers in the same director’s oeuvre, Guadagnino’s commitment to interrogating and capturing desire, its ecstasy, its destruction, bridges nearly all his work. Though each, and especially Suspiria, stand out boldly in their own right, together they form when of the most exciting filmographies still in the works today.
What do you want to see Guadagnino tackle next?
Suspiria premiered at the 2018 Venice Film Festival and played at the 2018 Fantastic Film Festival. It will be released in the US on October 26th.
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