Suspiria (2018)

Dario Argento’s 1977 original Suspiria is hardly a flawless work. And yet its problems are wound in tightly with the unique qualities that make it a summit of horror cinema. The slight plot and cheap effects enable a total surrender to fairy tale logic and structure, and justifies a form of cinema that’s entirely about the audience’s relationship not with characters but with director as he stage-manages gruesome spectacle and suspense sequences. Even the awkward dubbing of supporting roles in the English-language version exacerbates the creepy, alienated lustre. Argento’s film capped an era in horror cinema, as a raw farewell to the giallo school and a hello to the age of blockbuster cinema through total dedication to cinematic largesse and gesture. Remaking Suspiria was always going to be a hazardous move, and the long-mooted project was finally taken on by Luca Guadagnino, the acclaimed Italian director of I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2016), and Call Me By Your Name (2017). Guadagnino isn’t however the sort of filmmaker I’d associate with such a project. Although A Bigger Splash was nominally a thriller and did sustain a foreboding note, his films are more distinguished by his cunning for tapping the energies of his actors for studies in errant behaviour than for any hint of the gift for visual and narrative orchestration required to make a good horror film, never mind approach a model like Argento’s masterpiece.

The best thing that can be said about the new edition, working with a script by David Kajganich who also worked on A Bigger Splash, is that Guadagnino confirms quickly he’s determined not to make either a slavish emulation or the kind of generic recapitulation most horror remakes prove to be, but instead enlarge and improvise upon themes mooted in the original film, and the era that birthed it, which Guadagnino sets it in. Jessica Harper’s wide-eyed and forthright Susie Bannion is supplanted by Dakota Johnson’s rather more enigmatic creature. As suggested by a prologue depicting a withering Mennonite woman in a rural farmhouse, this Susie has been reconfigured as a young escapee from a repressive religious upbringing who arrives at the Helena Markos Dance Academy without any apparent background and training in dance, but who proves nonetheless to be a superlatively talented performer. The setting has been transferred from a multi-coloured chateau outside Munich to a Bauhaus outpost in a decaying neighbourhood adjacent the Berlin Wall. Terrorist attacks by radical groups like Baader-Meinhoff are shaking the city and filling TV news reports.

Dr Klemperer, who resembles the original's Dr Milius, a minor character briefly employed as a guide in the ways of witches, is here offered as a protagonist, an elderly psychiatrist who’s still hoping to somehow be reunited with his wife, who was transported east by the Nazis during the war. Klemperer is played by Tilda Swinton, in one of three roles she takes here, under the pseudonym Lutz Ebersdorf. At the outset the doctor is visited by Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz), one of the Markos Academy dancers who slinks about Klemperer’s office mumbling in two languages about mysteries and threats. Soon Patricia goes missing, as Susie successfully auditions for a place in the Academy, impressing the Academy’s lead instructor and choreographer Madame Blanc (Swinton 2). As Susie settles into strange new surroundings, she hears rumours that Patricia had become involved in terrorist groups and might have gone underground.

Soon signs that something infinitely more malign than radical cells is at work begin manifesting, and eventually it becomes clear the teachers and staff of the Academy all belong to a witches’ coven. After the Academy’s principal dancer Olga (Elena Fokina), storms out, ranting in paranoid fashion, Susie steps in and proves able to recreate a difficult dance near-flawlessly, earning her the lead role in a revival of the Academy’s signature repertory piece, a dance called “Volk.” As Susie performs Olga falls under the influence of a hex that seems to work through Susie, her dance moves twisting Olga literally in knots. Soon Susie is drawn into the confidence of another girl, Sara (Mia Goth), a friend of Patricia determined to find out what happened to her, but Susie seems to be tempted by the unstated but unmistakeable promise of power and stature afforded her if she will become the new physical vessel for the soul of Markos (Swinton 3), the ancient, bulbous founder of the coven.

Guadagnino’s Suspiria proves to be one of the most beggaring failures I’ve encountered in the past few years, a movie so utterly disastrous that it demands a ruthless dissection. Argento’s Suspiria was in part a work of tribute to older cinema creators and faces, and Guadagnino grasps this at least. Where Argento cast Joan Bennett and Alida Valli as the maîtresses of the Academy, and offered explicit homage to Fritz Lang as well as the fading pleasures of gothic horror in a deceptively contemporary setting, Guadagnino employs some queens of ‘70s and ‘80s Eurocinema, including Renee Soutendijk, Angela Winkler, and Ingrid Caven, to fill out the ranks of academic Satanists, mixed in with some more contemporary faces like Alek Wek and Sylvie Testud. But to say they’re wasted feels like understatement, as Guadagnino makes them hover as a mass of barely identified weirdos. Harper herself turns up as Klemperer’s wife, who bewilderingly resurfaces at a crucial juncture, requiring her and Swinton to converse entirely in German, which might be a product of Guadagnino’s sense of humour. Rather than emulate or enlarge upon Argento’s cinematic sensibility, however, Guadagnino proves rather more under the spell of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andrzej Zulawski: Zulawski’s Possession (1981), rather than Argento’s film, is Guadagnino’s style guide here, down to the grimy, colourless West Berlin setting and flesh-twisting escapades, whilst Fassbinder is felt more in the post-war guilt theme and evocation of a splintering body politic. 

Olga’s hideous fate under the hexing influence nominally tries to match Argento’s symphonic showmanship in his film’s first murder scene, but is actually a variation on the famous subway contortions of Isabelle Adjani in Zulawski’s film, pushed a few degrees further. The problem here is that Guadagnino’s attempts to redress Argento’s story in Zulawski’s clothes betrays not Guadagnino’s ingenuity or creative bent, but his indifference, bordering on contempt, for the project he’s nominally undertaking, and his ultimate lack of any sense of purpose for the film he’s made. Guadagnino and Kajganich set out to prove their independence and yet fall into one of the most blatant traps for filmmaker engaging in a remake: they offer a plot that only makes sense as a purposeful despoiling of the film they’re covering. The remake vaguely follows the structure of the original only to lead into a twist that’s hinted at with occasional flourishes relating to Susie’s history, but which makes no sense at all on any reasoned level. The very essence of Argento’s work with his scripting collaborator Daria Nicolodi, its dark and mischievous revision of a Grimm fairy tale as a slasher movie, is not only completely neglected by Guadagnino, but it seems he was entirely unaware of it. 

Guadagnino wants rather to make a soulful meditation on the post-World War II age and the self-defeat of radical possibilities, but goes about it in a way so wrong-headed, so empty of everything except pretension, it’s hard to believe anyone dared try it. The plot is robbed of all sense of mystery and menace, perhaps deliberately, as the machinations of the coven are heard in voice-over during apparently everyday scenes; there’s no sense of discovery or penetration of the forbidden. Perhaps it’s wise that Guadagnino tries to avoid echoing Argento’s visual approach, as Argento was at his height one of cinema’s great graphic artists. But some of my own lurking unease for Guadagnino as a director, nursed guiltily whilst watching his well-received previous films, hatched out here like a baby crocodile ready to nip my fingers. Guadagnino doesn’t substitute his own aesthetic for Argento’s: he confirms here he has no aesthetic at all, at least not one without actors capable of generating context for him. The fake Chabrol of A Bigger Splash and the fake Bertolucci of Call Me By Your Name at least gave those films a semblance of form; here the borrowings only contribute to the film’s utterly dissolution. The key early scene of Patricia’s talk with Klemperer is so fidgety, so nebulous, so incompetently shot and ineffectual as a narrative departure point, that I nearly turned the movie off there. 

Editor Walter Fasano leafs quickly but ineffectually through Guadagnino’s shots, trying to synthesise a coherent sense of unease and alienation, but nothing coalesces, and instead the film feels more a portrait of attention deficit disorder. Argento could generate tension and ambiguity with the briefest juxtaposition of shots. Guadagnino fumbles after effect. The notion of linking the institutional horror of the Dance Academy with the rage of terrorism without might have yielded an intelligent parable, but the script never sorts out what things stand for. Blanc mutters some guff about art no longer being allowed to be beautiful whilst offering the Academy as a kind of free feminist collective, not the best look for a place that turns out to be full of savage and destructive witches. The coven itself proves to be split amongst acolytes, some favouring Markos and others Blanc, which does vaguely suggest a lampoon of radical politics, if to no purpose as all. At least the original knew what it was about in that regard as Susie defied the watchdogs and eventually saw through the oppressive nature of her health regime which had tried to infantilise her: she was the lone wolf against the wicked institution and defying the corrupt matriarchy. 

Despite Guadagnino’s supposedly more realistic impulses, Argento and Nicolodi were more attentive to little bits of business, from the dancers’ money worries to the awkward flirtations, that substantiated the feeling that no matter how strange and artificial things were becoming they were still couched in a vaguely recognisable world. Guadagnino quickly shuts off such reflexes by resetting the story in a historical dead spot and freeing the dance students from any need to worry about money. The idea of doing more with plot’s insistent proximity of dance and witchery, something Argento and Nicolodi mostly neglected, was a good one at least. And yet once more Guadagnino doesn’t seem to know what to do with it, beyond deadpan gags about the loss of autonomy – by the film’s end there are several characters walking around with bodies variously broken, disembowelled, or withered, but unable to die. Argento of course had his own band Goblin to score his movie, to deeply infuse it with his aural as well as visual will. Here the scoring is by Thom Yorke, although it might as well have been stock music any old composer of drones and buzzes. All the major dancing sequences in the remake come sans music, as per Blanc’s preference, meaning they’re scored entirely by the slaps and thumps and scuffles of the performers’ motions, a touch that feels apt in revealing Guadagnino’s lack of any kind of musical sensibility, any sense of filmmaking as a rhythmic event but rather a succession of reflexes and twitches, as his camera jumps between set-ups to ineffectually regard the performing. 

The relationship of body to body is one that genuinely compels and interest Guadagnino, as all his previous works have been compelled by the strange witchery of flesh over will, but here this wispy sense of physical poetry is utterly defeated by being inflated to such a blunt and rhetorical overtness. The horror in the film is generally more gross than scary, but without any genuinely challenging sense of suffering or dire subsistence, except perhaps in the nasty moment when the coven slip meat hooks through the twisted but still living Olga. The climax, when it comes, proves so absurd and excessive in its orgy of bloodletting and try-hard spectacle that the effect is more nauseatingly comical, although paradoxically it’s also distinguished by an astonishing lack of wit. Seeing Johnson rip open her own chest to bare her heart, or Swinton’s eyes still swivelling as an aide tries to stick her head back on, might again be aiming for some level of crazy comedy; I’m just not sure. 

The ultimate revelation about who is the actual evil force (or rather the most evil force), might be considered shocking only if you haven’t seen a horror movie made in the last fifty years. Johnson revealed an unexpected gift for projecting iron-eyed barbarity in Bad Times at the El Royale (2018) and her part here might have extended it, but she’s utterly at the mercy of this film, which doesn’t give me any impression of knowing exactly what her character is. Guadagnino’s efforts here to revise a story based in simple dualism into something more complex felt reminiscent of John Boorman’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), but where at least Boorman’s film had some truly impressive cinema to buoy its mistakes, this film simply slouches around. The very end suggests what we’ve seen has all actually been a precursor to an act of closure, with the Mother of Sighs manifest as a kind of grief counsellor from beyond. Frankly I couldn’t even tap into Klemperer’s pathos because it seemed so extraneous, so phony; the stupidity of casting the heavily made-up Swinton in the part only exacerbated this (I got more of a kick from Swinton’s expertly observed mannerisms as the arch and arty Madame Blanc). For the most part I haven’t felt so justified in maintaining a suspicious attitude towards a director in quite some time as I do here confronted by Guadagnino’s fatuousness. He has at least achieved one milestone: the absolute abyss of the “elevated horror” movement.