IN THEATRES: Suspiria

1977, West Berlin. American Suzy Bannion (Dakota Johnson) is accepted to the exclusive Markos Dance Academy. While Suzy quickly advances through the company, under the watchful eye of Mme Blanc (Tilda Swinton),  elderly psychiatrist Dr Klemperer (Tilda Swinton) becomes suspicious that the academy's staff are involved in something nefarious...

A remake of Suspiria sounds like an odd idea - the original is a wholly cinematic experience, of image and sound so singular and overpowering that re-doing it always felt like hubris.

I am not the biggest Argento fan, but I've always liked Suspiria - it's the one Argento joint where the weird plotting and wooden acting make sense. A couple years ago, I had the opportunity to watch the movie on the big screen, with Goblin playing the score live. It was one of the best theatre-going experiences in my life. It really made me like the movie far more.

Suspria is one of those movies that lives and dies on a couple of key qualities: Argento's direction, the colour palette and Goblin's score.

Any remake would need to go in a completely different direction. On that count, this movie is pretty successful. In place of Argento's technicolour nightmare, you get the muted colours of West Berlin in 1977, grounded in a real historical context. 

In some ways, this movie is more of a fully-formed story, with its own specific ideas and themes.

I watched this movie weeks ago and I’ve been really struggling to come up with a clear read. It is more thematically complex than the original, yet somehow less interesting as a viewing experience - it alludes to a lot of ideas (particularly in terms of its historical setting), yet they feel weirdly isolated from the story.

Speaking of the story, it is... ultimately hard to grasp?

The movie is about hidden secrets and the traumas of the past haunting the present, with the old guard using the young to prolong their hold on power. The reveal that Suzy is the real Mother of Sighs, and the ancient Helena Markos (Tilda Swinton) is an imposter is where I really started to lose track of what was going on.

My read was that Suzy's reveal represented the hubris of believing that an assumed order is static and correct. In the end, the coven's old guard is revealed to be built on a lie and is destroyed.

As far as the cast go, the real standouts are Tilda Swinton and Tilda Swinton. As the headmistress struggling to keep the coven together, Tilda Swinton is terrifying yet the most empathetic character in the movie. She desires moving the coven into the present, but is out-votes. Swinton is more interesting in her other role as Dr Klemperer, an elderly shrink who investigates the witches, leading to a confrontation with the ghosts of his past. I would watch a movie about this character - when the movie is based around him and his wife (original Suspiria star Jessica Harper), the movie finds a centre.

My favourite aspect of the witches was how ordinary their interactions were - they do feel like long-serving staff who both share a sense of camaraderie and petty gripes with each other. It’s a character game going back to Rosemary’s Baby. While it does not really go anywhere, it does give the witches a sliver more personality.

The movie features some grue, but is not that scary. My thing is that there are no real rules to what the witches’ powers and goals are. As a stand-in for the scars of WW2 and the (then) ructions of West Germany, they kinda work, in an obvious way. But dramatically I was really confused what their function was.

This movie includes characters that are not the central focus, and a bunch of very specific themes that do not really add up to more than their most overt meaning. The West German backdrop of 1977 is well-realised, and ties in with the story of the witches, but this alignment never feels cathartic or satisfying in any way.

It is watchable, and occasionally unnerving, but it ultimately feels like a computer without a CPU. I don’t see this version of Suspiria obliterating the original or fading into the past. It is spinning so many plates that it will be inviting its own audience to muse over its themes.

But as a dramatic viewing experience, it never comes to life.

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