If you’ve ever watched Dario Argento’s 1977 horror film Suspiria and thought to yourself, “what this needs is to be an hour longer, stripped entirely of its gorgeous color palette, and to be dreadfully serious,” well, then, have I got a movie for you—it’s the new remake of Suspiria! Or, I should say, it’s the new “cover version,” which is what director Luca Guadagnino calls it.
I poke fun, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach—the new film takes the central mystery of the original and brings it right into the open, preferring instead to comment, I think, on power, who succeeds and who struggles to wield it, and our reckoning with how we have or haven’t used it in the past. And this could have been really interesting.
Guadagnino is undeniably a talented filmmaker. He directed one of last year’s very best movies, Call Me By Your Name, and though Suspiria couldn’t be more different from that one, it’s obvious that, technically at least, he’s doing exactly what he wants to do. The craft is spot on, and there are scenes that are truly, viscerally, horrifying—enough so that I had to force myself not to look away.
As for what he and the screenwriter are trying to say with this film… that’s much murkier. I’ll be accused of just not “getting” it, but I don’t mind not understanding a movie. In fact, sometimes I get a real charge out of thinking through what I just saw and trying to make it come together for me. Or, there are movies that are about evoking emotions rather than concrete ideas—think of anything by David Lynch.
But what I got from Suspiria was a movie that had some ideas and didn’t know what to do with them. I read a primer on 1970s German political and social upheaval to prepare to watch this, because I knew that was the backdrop of the film. And then, it’s just sort of… there? The Berlin Wall is always looming… and? It doesn’t seem to inform the movie in any substantial way. And this is the major failure of Suspiria—it’s got ideas, but to what end?
