Suspiria is about events surrounding a world-renowned dance company when an aspiring, untrained American dancer fills a sudden, mysterious vacancy in the troupe. What is going on beneath the surface?
If you are into film, especially horror movies, at some point, you’ll see a Dario Argento film, but if you did a little research, you’ll specifically watch Suspiria, Inferno and Mother of Tears in that order. Aesthetically I’m not into giallo, which is the term for Italian horror films, of which Argento is king, and the overarching story never resonated with me. I generally avoid remakes at the theater, and watching a remake of an original movie that I was never into is a low priority. The only reason that I put Suspiria in my queue was Tilda Swinton.
When I realized that Luca Guadagnino directed Suspiria, I knew it would be good, but he isn’t a horror movie director, he is squarely artsy fartsy, foreign film drama complete with subtitles. Have I lost you yet? It is not as boring as I’m making it sound. After seeing Call Me By Your Name in a packed theater, I have trepidation about seeing his films in theaters because while his work demands the majesty of a theatrical experience, the emotions that he is able to evoke are too personal to explore surrounded by strangers. If money were not an issue, I would buy all the tickets of a single showing to see his films. I saw I Am Love and A Bigger Splash at home, which provided me with the opportunity to revisit and appreciate specific scenes or pause when necessary. Guadagnino’s specialty is action films of the soul.
Suspiria may be Guadagnino’s best film to date, and I’m pleased to report that he can do horror. It is solidly one of my top ten films of 2018, and the fact that a director of Guadagnino’s artistic stature does not continue to receive mainstream awards and accolades when he ventures into less respectable genres signals more about the stunted vision of film institutions than the audacious work available to movie goers willing to take a peak at something more daring than Green Book. This movie is less a remake than an audacious and textured reinvention that makes the original seem two dimensional and forgettable.
I’ll start with the bad news about the film, and if it isn’t a turnoff, then you can stay while I gush about Suspiria then venture into spoilers. While I appreciate that Guadagnino contextualizes Argento’s original story by really elaborating on its historicity, specifically the politically turbulent urban life of Cold War, divided Berlin, as an ignorant American, I definitely think that I missed a great deal of meaning in the overall story because I’m only vaguely familiar with the events unfolding in the periphery. I would be curious how Germans with knowledge of their immediate history felt about how it affected the story. The framing of the narrative as six acts and an epilogue did not work for me. I tried to keep track of the general events of each section, but it is such an oneiric film that you won’t recall events by referencing a section except possibly the last two. It seems largely extraneous, and I’m probably missing the significance. Please feel free to explain it to me if it worked for you, and you think that it is essential to the story.
Suspiria is a perfect symphony of acting, editing, composition, camera movement and writing. Unlike most movies, it really understands how to hit a variety of notes at different rhythms at different times. For example, the film starts by being very furtive. The viewer can never get a good look at someone before the camera veers off in another direction; the editor cuts to a different image; an actor flees the frame. It creates a tension and anxiousness that gradually loosens as the mystery lifts behind the dance company and the characters. As we know more, we see more. It is also an unusual movie because it becomes calmer as the threats become more apparent, which reflects the central character’s certainty about her place in the world.
Suspiria is the kind of movie that I would recommend that you watch two times in a row. Time did not permit me to follow my own advice, but after one viewing, I did rewatch several sequences now that I (fully?) understood what was going on, knew who all the characters were and the significance of certain moments. I missed so much the first time around simply because many important moments and characters are initially obscured so we are hungry when we finally get to see them later and oblivious that they were present, but just outside of the frame. The movie is two hours thirty-two minutes, which is daunting for most viewers to sit through one time, but if you like weird horror movies, it definitely is worth it.
Even if you just appreciate dancing, Suspiria may be a must see film. The dancing is its own language and adds another layer to the film missing in the original. Instead of words, the performer’s movement, touch and eye contact directs power that culminates in a thrilling and rewardingly demented denouement. Dakota Johnson took two years of ballet just to prepare for her role as the American ingénue, Susie, and her hard work pays off although she may be a little old to play a new dancer. Swinton plays Madame Blanc, a Martha Grahamesque choreographer and director, who sees something special in the inexperienced, but instinctually expert dancer. There is one exchange between their characters that lost me when Susie disagrees with Blanc’s decision to leave the ground. Who was right?
Suspiria is a provocative compliment to Hereditary coming from the opposite end of the spectrum.
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If Hereditary is about a family that is unaware that it is the central focus of an occult conspiracy until it invades every aspect of their life to destroy them and bring forth the anti-Christ, then Suspiria is about an occult conspiracy that is unaware that the real savior has invaded them, come to deliver judgment against the anti-Christ or the false mother, and save the world from her abuse of power. Susie is the second coming of the Mother of Sighs, one of The Three Mothers, the most powerful supernatural force in the world, and she is reclaiming this coven which was supposed to be anointed to her from the false Mother Markos, a grotesque figure who is the real power behind the academy and in conflict with Blanc. Markos has overstepped her position and taken the offerings due to the god of their temple, Mother of Sighs, in violation of her priestly duties. Blanc is trying to balance her faithfulness to the Mother of Sighs and her agreement to obey Markos in a democratic election held within the coven in which Blanc lost.
[Side note: I don’t really get the mythology in a visceral way. The Mother of Darkness, Tears and Sighs does not immediately conjure up for me an image of their type of power and character so I just accept that Mother is a powerful title and keep it pushing. Darkness is evocative, and if I squint, I can understand tears, but sighs? No. To be fair, Argento was inspired by prose poetry, Suspiria de Profundis, written by Thomas De Quincey, and I have not understood poetry since law school. Philistine disclaimer: law killed poetry for me.]
This remake is more audacious than anything that Argento imagined because witches are always evil in his films then destroyed. Guadagnino’s reimagining is far more radical and interesting. He imagines what morality looks like in a pre-Christian, pagan world. Certain moments may seem evocative of pentagrams or the street version of Passover, but he is trying to suggest that those concepts are derived from them, not vice versa. The denouement reminded me of reading The Queen of the Damned when she could obliterate a vampire with a flick of her wrist.
The majority of Suspiria is bleak, gray and colorless. Berlin is a city of chaos and upheaval. It certainly seems like the end of days. Susie is the only source of color with her red hair. She also provides a tantalizing, rarely seen figure in horror movies. Suppose someone wants to be possessed or is not fighting against being fully immersed in the supernatural? Other people misinterpret her screams after a strange dream, “I know who I am,” as terror, not revelation. She never experiences a moment of revulsion or horror, but is overjoyed to finally be where she belongs. If you compare and contrast Susie and other people’s reactions to the supernatural, Susie is obviously not normal. She never gets horrified and runs away. She embraces it, but other characters’ misinterpret her acceptance of the existence of the supernatural and the idea of a coven in 1977 Berlin with approval of the coven’s actions.
The denouement and the epilogue provide a very different answer to the question of what Susie thinks of the coven. During the last supper sequence, when Susie does not eat, and the witches caress and cackle over the unsuspecting and slightly uncomfortable dancers, only Blanc shares her solemnity. For me, the most disturbing part of the film is that these dancers have no idea that every night, without consent, they are in a Red Shoes nightmare and forced to participate in some dance ritual while their subconscious absorbs all the gruesome details of the victimization of other dancers helpless to protect themselves or each other. They are enthusiastic participants and victims. Susie is the only dancer who does not rationalize away what she experienced because she is different.
The struggle for power over the dance company, the coven, is a war of mothers and ideology. Suspiria does not elaborate about the relationship between Markos and Blanc, but there is a weird portrait of them in a Cronenberg body horror frame, which suggests that Markos had a maternal relationship with Blanc until they opposed each other, which echoes Susie’s problematic relationship with her biological mother and her search for her soul mother, Blanc, whom Blanc is unwittingly drawn to because Susie is the real mother that Blanc tries to serve. Blanc recognized that Markos’ desire for power had become something distorted, exploitive and disgusting, and Markos sees her coven as her servants. Markos uses the power of the coven selfishly, not as a collective as they ostensibly prefer to promote in the outside world. Markos is willing to go to extreme measures, including killing the respectable façade of her coven, to survive. She eschews dance and the ideals of the coven as art and vanity. She is only interested in power. Did she really believe that she was one of the three Mothers or just using it to get what she wanted?
Susie only cares about dancing, but as we intuit, dancing is like a spell. Madame Blanc said, “Movement is never mute. It is a language. It’s a series of energetic shapes written in the air like words forming sentences. Like poems. Like prayers.” Dancing is power and devotion. As Mother Suspiriorum, she shares Susie’s values then punishes Markos and her followers by summoning death, but shows mercy to those who were not given a choice of whether or not to participate or who voted for Blanc. Also her treatment of the witness is very different from the other witches’ brutal handling of the witness and how they handle him after the abuse of power is eliminated. The second coming of Mother Suspiriorum heals the automatic gender division by not automatically condemning all men for the sins of some, and by the end of the movie, spring has come, and life has been restored. While love and other memories may have been erased so people can live or finally die in peace, those who were complicit with abuse are condemned to live with their memories haunted by the gory vision of judgment so they do not repeat history. It is a very cathartic and melancholy ending. When Judgment Day comes, the evil may be punished, but the effect of evil cannot be reversed. There is still loss, death and sadness that can never be erased. Mother Suspiriorum will remember the innocent dead, including Susie, who willingly sacrifices her self to become a vessel for her and honor them by blood and memory so more innocent, temporal creatures can continue to live free from the shadow of death.
Guadagnino’s treatment of post WWII Europe in Suspiria and Call Me By Your Name is very interesting. In these films, for life to be fully lived, you need Americans to occupy and redeem European spaces still haunted by the political sins of fascism, communism and any other ideology that ignores individual human dignity and autonomy. I don’t necessarily agree with his idea that only a few can bear the burden of memory so life and love can continue, and since many Americans are leading the charge to make Nazism acceptable, I can’t share his optimism about our presence.
After you watch Suspiria, I think that all viewers should saunter over to IMDb and read the credits, especially Swinton’s. With a couple of exceptions, the cast is filled with women. The brief glimpses of Susie’s sheltered origins suggest that she could have ended up a baby bride and mother, a fate that the coven had to avoid during the Third Reich, which is briefly alluded to in the movie. While feminism is not explicitly pondered, the backdrop of wicked men and desperate need for survival provides an explanation why the coven fell in line with the brutal, cannibalistic Markos, who must have been a formidable foe to keep them standing during the Nazi era and Russian invasion. Abused people turn into abusers and become oblivious to the fact that they were also exploiting young women.
There are so many seemingly ordinary early scenes that have devastating parallels later in the film. I could not shake the image of the casual vote over breakfast when they tallied the votes then said, “Let no one’s vote be held against her,” contrasted by Markos later rash strike, which effectively put the nail in her own coffin and her supporters, and the bloody denouement soon thereafter. Then Susie stretching before her audition in sweats contrasted with her big reveal as she opens her chest. (It is reminiscent of those images of Madonna or Mary and her Immaculate Heart with apologies to Catholics. I’m not trying to be sacrilegious or disrespectful. I don’t understand the significance of the imagery simply noticed the similarities, and apparently the image is supposed to evoke love and compassion.) She is simultaneously a Christ and Madonna figure sacrificing herself for the return of the Mother and the redemption of the coven. “I came here for this. You’ve all waited long enough.”
Blanc’s fate haunts me. We saw that in spite of every physical toil endured by Olga, Sara and Patricia, they still lived so it is possible that Blanc is somewhere in agony. She doesn’t get mercy like the innocent, but has to live with her complicity like the rest of the coven survivors. The visual dominance of Susie’s hair reminded me of Japanese horror imagery such as The Ring. There is a single post-credit scene, and if you understand its deeper meaning, please educate me. Sequel teaser?
I loved Suspiria, and if you can see it in a theater, definitely do so, but a home viewing demands complete attention and if you need breaks, then take them, but don’t multitask. I hated The Witch and have never found witches particularly satisfying horror fare until now.