Suspiria (

2018

)

When I first heard this film announced untold months ago, I, like many Argento fans, assumed the worst: That the remake would be a dull, lifeless affair that dutifully retraced the steps of the original with none of the audacity or creativity that made Suspiria (1977) such a wonderfully bizarre classic. When I stepped into the theater I figured I was in for at best a blasé bit of entertainment like The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and at worst a cinematic abortion like Straw Dogs (2011). Mercifully, I got neither. Instead, the new Suspiria is the kind of remake that I like best of all, the sort of film that goes off in a wildly different direction, bravely forging its own identity, independent of its precursor. The witches, the Tanz Dance Academy, and Suzy (now Susie) Bannion are all here but all altered beyond recognition. This is made clear from the very first inter-title, which announces that rather than contemporary Rome, today's film will take place in still-divided Berlin. Amusingly, the film unfolds over the same period of time, 1977, when the original Suspiria (1977) was released. From there other differences of style and tone quickly make themselves apparent. Gone, for instance, are the kaleidoscopic neon lights and bombastically decorated interiors. In their place, we get a world of muted grays, all grimy and austere. When the killing starts, there will be none of the beautiful, composed deaths of Argento's oeuvre. Instead, the violence is slow, ugly, and cruel. But this violence won't be coming for some time because this film is on a much slower boil than Argento's film; while both films open with a young woman desperately seeking asylum in a friend's apartment, the new Suspiria chooses to end the sequence with her peacefully departing rather than being stabbed through the heart, tossed through a skylight and hanged. It's obviously not as striking an intro, but competing with Argento in a contest of style over substance is a fool's errand and I don't respect director Luca Guadagnino any less for yielding the field gracefully.

Yet, the first scene of the new Suspiria not only showcases the film's greatest strengths but also reveals its most serious shortcomings. Boldly forging your film's own identity is all well and good, but what do you do when this new identity is boring and tedious? Part of the problem is the run-time. The film stretches on and on for two and a half hours. I don't know when it became acceptable for every action/comedy to have a run time approaching that of Gone with the Wind (1939), but now I fear that the infection has spread to horror films as well. Filmmakers take note: audiences don't pay for movies by the minute and we won't feel cheated if your film is only 90 minutes long (or 80, or even 70 if the film is well put together). As the movie plodded on, it became increasingly obvious that Suspiria was in desperate need of an aggressive script editor. Whole plot-lines and characters go nowhere and do nothing; the character of Dr. Josef Klemperer is a particular waste of time. Klemperer is based off the parapsychologist who turns up for one scene in the original Suspiria (1977), who is investigating the plausibility of either madness or something worse at the Tanz dance academy. For reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, Luca Guadagnino has transformed him into the film's secondary protagonist and given him a plot arch that consists mainly of moping over his missing and presumed dead wife. Add in the pointless name drop of Jacques Lacan to earn points with unemployable philosophy majors and the movie began to try my patience in more ways than one. A slow film is bad, a pretentious one is worse, and nothing is more infuriating than one that is both at the same time. Occasionally the film would try to pull me back in with an odd bit of violence but this became increasingly lazy as the hours wore on, reaching its apogee near the end when a woman stabs herself for literally no reason. Nor does anything come from this stabbing. In trying to liven up the film, Guadagnino only gave us yet another scene that could be cut without any consequence to the overall movie.

Back in the film's actual plot, a young American dancer named Susie Bannion has recently arrived in Berlin determined to win a spot in the prestigious Tanz dance academy by dint of her passion and ability. She's been singularly possessed by the idea of studying at Tanz ever since she first saw them perform in New York City. So, she ran away from her home, a bleak farm, and her family, an especially dour bunch of Mennonites, to try her luck in an audition. Lucky for her, the script reads like something out of a middle school girl's self-insert fanfiction, and not only does she ace the audition but immediately lands the lead role in the academy's upcoming show. More importantly, for our purposes, she possesses a singular ability that the coven of witches who secretly run the school need in order to further their own plans. With the proper training, given to her by the academy's top teacher, Madame Blanc, she'll soon be ready to serve as a vessel for the soul of the coven's decaying leader (and nominally the school's headmistress) Helena Markos.

Guadagnino's greatest innovation with the film is the way in which the magic works; rather than being the bog-standard blood and smoke rituals we're accustomed to, the witches here conduct their magic through dance. Making art literally magic has a certain appeal to it. Though I've never felt it with dance, everyone has at some point been affected by a work of art or a performance in a way that they cannot fully explain. Seeing The Body in concert for the first time, to use personal experience, certainly had a magical effect on me as my pulse quickened and my vision swam in the middle of the crowded venue. Not only that but by making dance a conduit of magic Guadagnino gives the film a reason to be set in a dance academy, rather than the original (I suspect) purpose of it being a place where a lot of young athletic women gather. Since we're going to be spending a lot of time watching ballet, it helps that the choreography for the dance sequences is engaging and the cinematography is interesting. Even still, I think 5-10 minutes of uninterrupted ballet or modern dance would try the patience of all but the non-enthusiast. Fortunately, these sequences are interspersed with the effects of the magic that the dance with the spell it casts. In the first dance scene, for instance, we see a poor student battered and contorted into impossible shapes in-between shots of Susie dancing; the violence eerily mirroring her performance.

However, whenever the film tore itself away from these lavish dance numbers and the pointless psychiatrist subplot, it runs into a not inconsiderable problem: Its main character has all the personality of a damp towel. I mentioned above that she reads like the self-insert fanfiction of a juvenile writer, but if this were the case then the tween girl Guadagnino got to pen the script is seriously dull. Susie has virtually no personality, and she's lacking even the most basic motivations. All she can say is that she was inexplicably drawn to Tanz and once there she unthinkingly does whatever the other characters tell her to do. As the witches coven begins to fracture, Susie becomes not so much the protagonist at the center of affairs as a Macguffin that the different groups squabble over. As a result, most of the heavy lifting of the plot falls to Susie's friend, Sara, who at least has some goal she's pursuing. Sara is trying to find out what happened to her friend Patricia, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances not long ago. As she investigates, she discovers that the school is not what it seems. Being rooted in comprehensible human emotions, Sara's story is much more engaging than Susie's, so it's a real shame that it's relegated to sideshow status.

The film develops an even greater problem once it lets us in on the plot's main conflict: a power struggle between Madame Blanc and Helena Markos for control over Tanz and the coven. The problem with this is that both Markos as Blanc are equally reprehensible to any sane viewer, being both murderous witches who further their ends by exploiting the young women placed in their charge. Now, this would be fine if the protagonist was either exploiting this conflict al la A Fistful of Dollars (1964) or merely caught up in it against their will like in The Road Warrior (1981), but as we've established Susie doesn't have enough personality to do either. As a result, the main conflict of the film feels shallow, because the viewer doesn't have any stakes in the conflict. Maybe the murderous witch will win, or maybe the other murderous witch will outmaneuver her. As if underlying the complete pointlessness of the struggle, both Markos and Blanc are played by the same actress. This is the problem when films do away altogether with the concept of heroes and villains but don't have anything to replace it with. You get boring stories about dull people. Not even the film's bombastic conclusion couldn't revive my interest at that point, and it featured a dozen nude women, a monster, and several people exploding into bloody chunks.

Then there are the political undertones. Of course, this is $_CURRENT_YEAR, so not even a surreal horror movie about witches can be allowed to go without the requisite “nazis are bad mkay” lecture. While it's true that this film is no slouch in that regard, Guadagnino has also muddied the waters rather effectively. For instance, the Red Army Faction is constantly being mentioned by the characters and appearing in various ways off-camera and in the background. For those not up-to-date on recent German history, the Red Army Faction was a band of terrorists who claimed to be trying to defeat what they saw as the fascist government of West Germany. They did so with random acts of violence, including kidnappings, assassinations, and good old fashioned bombings. Since I can no longer trust that the irony of an ostensibly anti-fascist organization winning support through political violence will be self-apparent I must also mention that when an affiliated terrorist group hijacked an Air France plane (an event the film mentions in passing), they separated the Jewish passengers from the non-Jews and let the non-Jews go (the film neglects to mention this). This message of political wolves in sheep's clothing is mirrored with the school itself which purports to be a solidly feminist organization through a couple of snatches of heavy-handed dialogue. Yet, the teachers at the school are using the girls placed in their charge as pawns in their own internal power struggles in addition to exploiting the girls' bodies for their own gain. The implications for modern politics should be obvious, but such a stance is contradicted by Guadagnino's own statement on the matter (which are very much in line with the current progressive dogma). Maybe he's just covering his ass against the possible backlash of having an unpopular opinion in such a politically charged epoch but as it stands the actual message of the film is effectively impenetrable.