As if taking a cue from mother!, Darren Aronofsky's magnum opus of madness, Luca Guadagnino has not only remade Suspiria with and for a new age of gods and monsters, but has indeed fashioned a unique cinematic experience determined to make you squirm.
Dario Argento's 1977 original served as a sort of watershed moment, an icon of Italian giallo that perfectly bridged the gap between supernatural horror and slasher aesthetic. Guadagnino has kept the essence of the story: A young woman arrives at a prestigious dance academy in Germany, assuming a recently vacated position and quickly rising in the company. As strange horrors plague the academy, though, the girls suspect their mentors of diabolical designs and research what has come to be known as the Three Mothers, Argento's creation of embodiments of evil, a mythology he explored in a trilogy of films.
Whether Guadagnino plans a similar trilogy remains a mystery, but I certainly hope he does. Not because they need remaking, but because his reimagining is here so bloody effective.
The original film sets itself up as an impressionistic fairytale, drenched in vibrant, abstract colors and deceptively simple in themes and plot. Not so here, where Guadagnino has stretched the film to two-and-a-half hours of almost mind-numbing complexity. With cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, he's drained the film of almost all its color, leaving us in a cold grayscale that forces us to meditate on what we don't see. Until, of course, the blood gushes; then we remember that this is the wicked stepsister of Argento's film.
Resituated in time and place, this movie takes place in 1977 Berlin, and though the anxieties this raises aren't explained to those of us who don't know our history, it is immediately clear that Berlin is host of deep cultural wounds that are not healed. Whereas Argento's film found a home in dreamy Freiburg (again with the fairytale bent), here we're smack-dab in a modern city, with chaos and molotov cocktails ruining the streets. We're initially introduced to Dr. Klemperer, a psychologist on whom the film hinges, and through him we read a keen sense of injustice and trauma that coldly underpins the proceedings. His wife, you see, disappeared when the Nazis took over.
On a more immediately accessible plane, though, the themes of sisterhood and motherhood remain strong in this new adaptation. Bolstered by strong performances across the board, the characters exist in a brutal world as fully formed psychological beings; their wheels are always turning, and the camera will often rest on their faces as they do nothing but think. Dakota Johnson leads here -- who knew she could really act? -- with astounding physical skill, dancing her way through numbers of increasing intensity. But it's Tilda Swinton who truly stars, taking on multiple characters as a chameleon and disappearing under layers of impossibly convincing makeup. Her Madame Blanc, matron of the dance, takes an immediate liking to Johnson's young heroine, and despite the deadly power-play at work in the academy, she rules all with patience and striking kindness.
Patience and kindness, that is, much like the film itself. Guadagnino has carefully calculated every breath of this film -- appropriate, as Suspiria refers to the "sighs" of pain -- to be slow and deliberate, drawing you in and forcing you to exist in the world it creates rather than simply watching. Along with entrancing music by Radiohead's Thom Yorke, the film's sound mixing and editing is designed to pop, creeping into your ears and under your skin for maximum effect. Nowhere is this more powerful than in an early scene -- the movie reveals its mystery early, so you can drown in the style instead of the story -- when Dakota Johnson dances in her audition. Every step and flex she makes assaults your ears, and you hear every pop, crack, and thud; this is amplified when we see that the dance is a form of violent magic that bends and breaks the body of another girl in the academy. Whereas the original film found pleasure in sudden stabs and gushing blood, here we are subjected to body horror of the highest caliber. Bones grinding and snapping have never been more visceral.
Apart from its skilled body horror, audiences wanting striking terror are in for a disappointment. While this film takes sadistic pleasure in pushing the female body to its limits and viewing urine and blood and bones, it's by no means meant to scare you. Instead, it exists and invites you to share in its uncanny chill, its deliciously subversive approach to anticlimactic horror, and its ultimately tragic sense of how very wrong humans can go. That's what struck me the most, during what is arguably the climax -- a scene that will satisfy even the bloodthirstiest gorehounds -- when what should be as gruesome and disgusting as Evil Dead or Carrie becomes elegiac and profoundly sad.
While this movie has plenty of disturbing sensory moments -- the best of the year -- its purpose lies under the skin, seeking to not only quicken your heart but also to pain it. This movie is a consummate work of art: a work about art (dance) that uses never-before-seen techniques to remaster the form of film itself, to make insightful commentary about the power of art in our broken lives and about broken art in our lives, and to make itself a new way of viewing not only a genre but our world. Breathe with Suspiria and allow its meditation on guilt, generational pain, the limits of the body and of memory, and of female fellowship to invade your heart. Breathe with Suspiria and it will take over your senses. Breathe with Suspiria and witness the awesome power of modern horror cinema.
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