The sound of drums progresses into a hypnotic rock lullaby, punctuated with whispers, screeches, and ominous ad libs. As the opening credits continue and the title track, aptly titled “Suspiria”, continues to play, narration suddenly cuts over the same, an indication to the audience that the following story will operate more as a poetic fairy tale than a straightforward tale consistent with a logic we normally expect. The narrator explains that a young American woman, Suzy Bannion, has decided to perfect her ballet skills at a prestigious dance academy in Freiburg, Germany and has flown out to attend it. As the narration ends the score becomes more violent and cuts out. The opening credits give way to Suzy entering the Freiburg airport. Everything seems normal – that is until the door leading out of the airport opens up. As they open, “Suspiria” plays once again. However, as soon as the doors close, the score disappears. This sequence repeats itself – the score playing while the doors open and disappearing when the close again – signals to the audience that outside the world of the airport the rules of reality no longer apply. Suzy exits the airport and the score suddenly bursts through the reality of the world culminating in a crescendo with a burst of rain to visually signify the torrential chaos to come.

Suzy desperately tries to flag down a cab, eventually finding one but becoming soaked in the process. As she gets in the vehicle to dry herself, the lighting in the movie reminds the audience that this is now a world of fantasy, as the screen is tinged with neon blues and reds, interrupted by bits of yellow periodically. The reds become an orange while the blues become a green, creating an everchanging color palette which keeps the eyes fully engaged with the screen. Harper’s face becomes the canvas upon which the colors dance making Suzy appear as though she’s being interpellated by and into this new phantasmal world.

Her cab makes its way through an ominous forest filled with a plethora of tall and imposing trees, as Goblin hisses “Witch” in an eerie and disorienting way as the score still rages on. The cab pulls up to the school, an imposing building with a red exterior as the score comes to a close. She exits the cab and sees a girl, Pat, muttering nonsensical worlds by the entranceway and running away in a hurry. Suzy attempts to get into the school but is told to go away by someone on the other side. Desperate to get out of the rain, she gets back in the cab and looks for a place to stay until she can solve the issue the next day. As the car drives back through the woods, she sees Pat running through the woods. A new song starts to play – “Witch” which replaces the melodic “Suspiria” with a more intense and aggressive beat that conveys an immediate sense of danger as opposed to wonder. The movie switches from Suzy in the car to Pat as she she enters a dormitory whose architecture radiates an absolute aesthetic beauty, with pleasing geometric compositions littering every part of the room. The walls are bathed in in a blood red. However, the real oddity with this entrance room is its size, which feels exceptionally large when compared to Pat’s small frame, highlighting how tiny and powerless she is compared to the threat that she’s trying to get away from. The room threatens to swallow her up whole.

She hurriedly rushes up the ornately decorated elevator to visit and stay with a friend of hers for the night. Obviously perturbed, even the smallest disturbance sets her off. She’s worried, but we still don’t know what it is that’s tormenting her. The camera switches to a view of her from outside the building, slowly zooming in like a typical POV shot in Argento’s other giallo movies. As she continues to look out, she happens upon a dimly lit set of yellow eyes and is immediately accosted by a pair of arms which break through the window, dragging her out of the living unit. She’s brutally murdered along with her friend, and the movie returns to Suzy, finally ready to start after giving the audience a preview of everything they should be expecting.

This is Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria, a fairy tale from hell born straight from German Expressionism given life through immaculate sets, gorgeous neon lighting, a bombastic score that never lets up, and compositions that make the piece feel more like a set of paintings than an actual movie.

The plot is sparse and as the narration at the beginning informs us, is more a throughline by which a series of nightmarish images and ideas are allowed to come to life. The story loosely involves Suzy experiencing a strange series of events while attending the supposedly prestigious dance academy. Pat’s death is merely the domino that sets the series of unexplainable happenings in motion. Who or what is the killer and what is their actual motivation? Certain scenes in the movie hearken back to traditional giallo images (ex: a POV shot of the killer looking at Pat and her subsequent brutal and gory murder), while other shots invoke a supernatural feeling that can’t be explained. The contrast helps drive the mystery and Suzy’s journey forward.

At a higher level , the movie is a coming of age story, about a young girl trying to find her place in a new and alienating world. One of Suzy’s first tasks is even getting to the school, because her accent makes it hard for the German driver to understand what she’s actually saying. Once she gets to the school she’s denied entrance. Once she’s allowed into the school, she’s immediately bombarded with requests to pay money for various services and items. It’s like a nightmare of what a kid has to look forward to as an adult, and this idea is reflected in every aspect of the set. The rooms are large and seem to swallow up the characters’ agency. Doors are slightly out of reach and make her and her classmates seem infantile. She’s constantly put in a position where her decisions are ignored in favor of instructors at the school who seem to have their own priorities. This larger thematic schema gives the horror a new dimension. It’s scary enough to navigate an alien world, but doing that as a younger person broaching into adulthood and being thrust into a new dimension of responsibility is something else all together. Combined with the supernatural happenings and bouts of violence that surround her, the world of Suspiria feels more like a gorgeous hellscape.

This is reflected in the genius visual design of the movie, which might be one of the best uses of color in cinema – full stop. Almost every scene is draped in a neon blue or red – the former representing an impending doom and the latter representing violence and death. At every turn these colors are transformed by the presence of a yellow, which transforms passive moments into active moments of tension. As red turns to orange, the characters and audience are lulled into a false sense of security that quickly evaporates as it becomes obvious that the characters are doomed. Likewise, as blue turns to green the danger that’s targeting the characters becomes active and threatens to fully envelop them in its violence. Luciano Tovoli works an ethereal magic in every scene in this way, by pushing colors to their absolute limits. There are dozens of shots which can be printed and framed as works of arts. A movie is lucky if it gets a few, but Tovoli makes Suspiria a buffet filled with them.

This combined with the score transforms the movie from a simple murder mystery into cinematic poetry, as every moment is punctuated with Goblin’s score. No piece of music ever feels like it overstays its welcome and each of them immediately tell the audience what they need to know – a character is being observed by the killer, a character is in danger, things are going absolutely off the walls. It’s hard to watch the movie and not be moved along by the score which is not only effective, but genuinely catchy. From the sharp and loud pounding noises in “Witch” that get the heart rate pumping to the whispery and otherworldly “Suspiria” the soundscape of the movie feels like a whole other character.

Keeping all the pieces of the movie moving together is Argento’s trademark pacing and macabre sensibilities. Just because he’s tackling a different horror sub-genre doesn’t mean that his usual bag of tricks won’t work. In fact I’d argue that the supernatural sensibilities of the story (due in part to the wonderful work of his undermentioned fellow screenwriter, Daria Nicolodi) let him push his ideas to their absolute extreme. Whereas his previous movies, like Deep Red or The Bird With the Crystal Plumage , had to obey some level of logistics when it came to killing victims and solving the mystery, Suspiria is allowed to explore sequences that would otherwise be impossible. Characters die in ways that you’d never be able to predict which helps sustain a palpable sense of tension throughout the movie. It’s impossible to know how violence will happen , but because the colors and music tell you something is going to happen, every moment is injected with a dread that only continues to build one bloody death at a time. The first 9 minutes of the movie starts the tension off right and the movie never lets up until the end credit sequence starts up again.

Many people place this as one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Many others go one step further and rank Suspiria as one of the most important cinematic achievements to date (given how many movies have been influenced by its visual style, I’d say that’s probably accurate) . I consider myself firmly in both of these camps. I’m someone who usually loves a good, layered, and intricate plot that ties into a nuanced set of themes. However, when it comes to Suspiria, all those inhibitions seem to float away because the magic of the movie, the poetic way it moves through its score and visual style, speaks to something more important than a need for logic and precision. This is a cinema in the purest sense of the word. It’s a piece of art that must be experienced and not explained. If you haven’t yet had the chance to see this masterpiece, I urge you to give it a chance. Let Argento take you to a world of nightmares.

Report Card

Go to Page 2 to view this review’s progress report .

NOTE: Some of the images contained in the review contain nudity that are NSFW. Please leave the page if you are not of a legal age to view the same.

NOTE: To those readers who have still not watched Dario Argento’s Suspiria , this review will be making quite a few comparisons between the two given that this movie is a remake. While I personally do not think these spoilers amount to anything crucial (Argento’s movie operates on a poetic logic that has to be seen and heard to truly understand the magic), I find it important to mention the same. With that out of the way, Argento’s classic is considered by many fans to be one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Within the past year, I’ve found myself completely entranced with the visual beauty and absolutely wonderful use of music. It’s a movie I consider near and dear to my heart. Making a remake of such beloved entry would be tantamount to cinematic insult if it did not do something genuinely worthwhile. Thankfully, I think Guadagnino’s re-telling feels less like a remake and more like a fleshing out of the narratively barebones original. Instead of focusing on spectacle to keep the audience’s attention, this updated Suspiria operates on a heavy narrative and thematic level, developing every tiny detail from the original in a way that both pays respect to the cinematic behemoth, while being more than capable of dancing on its two feet.

The movie opens in Berlin during the height of the German Autumn, a historical period fraught with revolution, counterculture, and tense political relations. The president of the German Employee’s Association, a former Nazi, is kidnapped by the Red Army Faction, a West German youth protest/terrorist group, in an attempt to force the West German government to release RAF members. Amidst these scenes of violence and protest a young lady, Patricia, makes her way to Dr. Josef Klemperer’s office. In his office are books by Carl Jung, a famous psychoanalyst who talked frequently about collective myths and the ways they permeate through social activity and consciousness. Obviously perturbed, Patricia talks in a seemingly nonsensical fashion obviously upset. She rambles about a song playing that the Dr. cannot hear and starts talking about a conspiracy happening involving witches grooming students at the dance academy she attends for some nefarious purposes. As she speaks the violence from outside continues to rage on. Klemperer writes in his notes that Patricia’s delusions have taken more power, convinced that she’s delusional. Patricia leaves the session but not before informing the doctor that these witches won’t hesitate to “hollow [her] out and eat [her] cunt on a plate,” if they realize she attended this session.

Then the movie cuts to an farm house in Ohio. The song, Suspirium, by Thomas Yorke plays as different shots of the house are shown. The movie cuts to a poster on a wall that indicates that a “Mother is a woman who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take”.

As the scene continues to play out, it’s clear that a death has happened and the raspy whisper like singing from Yorke gives the whole scene an ethereal feeling. This isn’t even taking into consideration the lyrics which ask questions about dancing, agency, metaphysical darkness, and Motherhood. The juxtaposition between the political and psychoanalytic session in Germany with this quieter and more ethereal scene about death and agency in a religious community form the lifeblood of the movie.

In just 8 minutes, it’s made clear that political tension, insurgent forces, witches, motherhood, the relation between the individual and their society, and psychoanalysis all play a key role in what’s to come. With the subtext firmly established, the movie cuts to Susie, a member of the religious community, leaving for a prestigious dance company in Berlin – the same one Patricia mentioned earlier. She makes her way to the entrance to the school, which is directly next to the Berlin wall , both to highlight the divided sociopolitical period the movie takes place in and to suggest that the school is as divided as the country at the time.

As soon as she comes into the school, she’s made to do an audition with no music. Given that she’s come to the school during an irregular time with no prior credentials she must earn her stay, according to one of the senior instructors, Miss Tanner. In what I can only describe as eerily beautiful, Susie dances as though possessed by something supernatural. Her power radiates in every single movement, reverberating through the school with such ferocity that even the main instructor, Madame Blanc, notices and makes her way to the audition room. It’s clear there’s something different about this student – a dancer with music permeating her very being even if nothing plays in the background. With her clear display of skill it’s a no brainer that she makes it into the dance company. But as Patricia noted earlier, there’s definitely something afoot. In fact, Patricia has now disappeared, giving Susie the chance to move into her room at the facility. This disappearance serves as the inciting incident for the supernatural journey to come and given Patricia’s eerie warnings from earlier, sets the stage for the horror that will unfold. What follows is a slow burn that carefully cooks together this mystery along with the subtext to deliver a truly powerful film that seeks to be a period piece, a supernatural horror mystery, a commentary on female agency, a meditation on politics and the way they develop at a micro and macro level, with a healthy heaping of dancing to go along to tie it all together.

To those of you expecting to see violence (it is a Suspiria remake after all), the movie delivers what I would argue are scenes that are just as brutal and disturbing as the original, eventually ending in a way that makes good on its genre classification as “horror”. Unlike the original movie, however, the characters who are brutalized and made the victims of such violence are ones that we as an audience spend a lot of time with, so each of these acts hits that much harder. These moments are more spread out during the run-time, but I’d argue that the pacing in between makes them all the more effective as a visceral phenomena that refuses to leave the mind after watching.

To say the movie is ambitious in what it’s trying to achieve is underselling just what a monumental feat Guadagnino is attempting to deliver. Are there some missteps? Sure. Sometimes the movie feels like its a bit like its preaching to the audience to make them aware of the intricacies being developed. I personally would have liked the movie to lean less in the general politics of Germany of the time given how small it ends up feeling when everything is said and done. That being said, for every overt thematic nod there’s multiple clever and and subtle developments that might slip your attention on the first watch. The movie is so dense that I think you actually have to watch it multiple times or you end up missing on a bunch of small details that end up meaning quite a lot. That’s an attention to detail that’s rare in movies nowadays, let alone horror movies.

The constant reminder of the external political struggles enveloping Germany contrasts the internal political machinations going on in the dance school. The German public’s attempt at forgiving having a Nazi in such an important political position causes us to question the legitimacy hierarchies , big and small. The death of the mother at the beginning with the declaration that the mother is a leader who’s universal and irreplaceable takes on a new meaning when applied in the context of all female school going through a political struggle of its own, one where a student fearful for her life disappears . This combined with the presence of a Jungian psychoanalysis makes the connection between the disparate elements clear – are the hierarchies between the religious family, the dance school, and the German government similar? Are they all just reducible and manifestations of the same general consciousness- or are they distinct? The distinctive mention of the Mother and the all-females nature of the school adds a gendered aspect to this idea that attempts to situate the subjective experience of women in relation to an overarching structure. This is why the movie is as long as it is. There’s no way to explore this much without spending the time to develop each idea in depth. Too little time and things would end up feeling half baked. Too much and details would feel pedantic. By and large I think the movie hits a sweet spot in between.

While Argento’s original movie makes use of bright and vibrant colors to make every frame feel like a piece of wall art, Guadagnino prefers a more muted color scheme to reinforce the “realistic” nature of the movie. It’s not that he’s trying to hide the supernatural happenings – an early scene clearly demonstrates that the Witches are more than willing to brutally kill those who are a threat to their community through spells performed through intricate dance techniques. Rather, the movie treats its supernatural happenings as grounded in reality. It’s an difficult balancing act to be a period piece in one hand and a fantasy thriller on the other, but the movie walks that line in a way where each element builds upon and reinforces the other in a natural and conducive way. The story emphasizes this feeling in its narrative structure. One half of the movie follows Susie trying to move up the ranks of the dance school, her motives unknown. All this time, it’s made apparent that the witches want something from her in the same vein that they wanted from Patricia. The other half of the movie follows Dr. Klemperer as he tries to investigate the disappearance of Patricia. Despite thinking she was suffering from delusions, he’s very much concerned with her wellbeing and tries to investigate the school in relation to her whereabouts, in his own ways grounded in reality. The former is a story about magic permeating the real world and exploding in key moments throughout it. The latter is a story of the real world’s attempts at explaining and investigating supernatural phenomena in cultural and psychoanalytic configurations to make sense of the same. The push and pull between these two halves of the story is what keeps it feeling wholly unique – both grounded in reality and heightened by fantasy.

This feeling is emphasized in the visual design of the movie both in:
A: its use of mirrors and reflective services to emphasize the ever changing nature of perspective and interconnectedness between seemingly disparate story elements

B: the presence of surreal and fleeting dream sequences which inject the story with a good old fashioned serving of “what the hell is that?” and “holy hell, that’s frightening.”

In the context of reflective surfaces, their presence is made fully aware to the audience early on. There are mirrors absolutely everywhere. The room the dancers use to practice is filled with mirrors from every side, reflecting the movement of the bodies and their respective gazes- their hidden desires. Some mirrors open up to reveal hidden pathways. Others operate like one-way see-through glass panes, reflecting a subject while allowing people on the other side to gaze upon them without detection. One of the most interesting uses of mirrors is reflecting the shifting power dynamic between the dancers. Early on, when Susie first moves into Patricia’s old room she meets Sarah, a kind girl who immediately welcomes her into the academy. Their conversation takes place in front of mirrors and shows their faces normal, happy. As the movie continues and key events come to light, the mirrors reflecting their conversation become blurred and muddy, reflecting their changes in point of view both of themselves and one another.

As Madame Blanc tells Susie later on in a 1-on-1 dance session, “[p]art of the issue always is not being able to see your body in space. One angle in one mirror or on film is not enough. ” Given the movie’s goal in connecting the outer political struggle to internal mystery and power imbalance, the mirrors serve as a connective tissue that reveal the way events can be connected, even if not immediately apparent- an ever shifting balance of knowledge and power.

Likewise, the eerie and flashing dream sequences keep the audience on their toes by displaying series of images that aren’t immediately capable of being interpreted. These moments feature breathtaking shots and compositions that are visually unnerving and thematically hefty. In fact, I’d argue a lot of the more disturbing and horrifying images happen in these moments. As the scenes flicker past one another, some of them coming onto the screen for only brief moments, it’s clear that the we’re seeing both the past and the future events of the movie from a different point of view. No image is out of place, but they refuse an immediate categorization in exactly what they’re supposed to represent. They give impressions of what characters have gone through and what is to come, with barely a hint of what images fall into what category. Like the mirrors, the Truth can only be revealed once the different perspectives coalesce to present a more complete and developed picture.

However, the biggest reason all these elements can come together in such a profound and seamless way is because every single actor -big or small- gives a knockout performance. If any of these performances didn’t nail the mark, the tightrope walking the movie does would threaten to fall in on itself. I could spend pages just talking about the small nuances that every one of these leading ladies bring to their roles, but I’ll try my best to condense the same. Starring as the lead, Dakota Johnson brings an eerie ferocity to her performance as Susie. She radiates power and confidence without ever giving away what her true motivations or goals are. Her face is resolute but imperceptible. She can switch from cold and apathetic to kind and nurturing at a snap. In contrast, Mia Goth’s portrayal of Sarah is absolutely filled with a warm and radiant kindness. From the way she coyly smiles to the way she shows concerns for her friends to the subtle ways she holds her decorum in the presence of unsettling realities, she absolutely holds up as a symbol of warmth. Her scenes with Johnson are my favorite because of how well the two actors play off one another, taking a friendship that was barebones in the original movie, and genuinely elevating it and imbuing with a real sense of affection that then permeates and gives the movie a resonant emotional feeling .

That being said, this is Tilda Swinton’s show as she plays three of the main characters with absolute perfection. It’s hard enough to deliver nuance in one character, but she manages to give three live to three totally different characters and breathe a nuance and characterization to them that would make you certain that it was not one person running the show. As Madame Blanc, the primary dance instructor at the institution, she radiates power and charisma. She’s a hero in the eyes of the dancers both for her skill and her dedication to promoting a female empowerment. Watching her cold exterior give way to genuine care when it comes to interacting with Dakota gives the character a healthy level of depth. Despite being under a heap of prosthetics in her portrayal of Dr. Klemperer, she gives the old and weary psychologist a profound tenderness and sense of vulnerability. From the way she quivers her lips to the way she shows pain in her eyes, it’s hard to imaging that it’s not an actual old man playing the character. His character is what injects a lot of the story beats with a genuine emotional somberness that threatens to bring the audience to tears at times. I went into the movie not knowing that it was her playing multiple roles and could not believe that she had managed to pull it off so effortlessly until reading about the movie later. Given the importance of the characters she plays and the incredible amount of differences between them, I have to emphasize just how superb she is.

Suspiria (2018) does what any remake should aspire to do – take the source material, explore it in new and distinct ways, and do this all without destroying the beauty of what came before. The way the movie takes the smallest elements – witches, the tale of the 3 Mothers, the dance academy, dancing as an art form, secret conspiracies- and blows them all up front and center is a testament to every member from the screenwriters to the actors. This isn’t a movie that shies away from comparisons with Argento’s work of art. Instead it works as a another side of the coin- a different perspective on the seminal work of horror. From the ethereal and wispy score by Yorke which serves as a foil to Goblin’s original bombastic rock score to the subdued color pallet and shot composition which contrasts the neon Expressionism that came before, this is a movie that’s not afraid to be different. Do I think all fans of the original will enjoy this? No. There’s a reason the reaction to the movie has been so polarizing. But those who are willing to consider a mirrored perspective to the original movie might walk away with appreciation for just how far a new angle can take a story.

Report Card

Go to Page 2 to view this review’s progress report .