35
So what does Guadagnino’s version convey? Boredom, mostly, with confusion and a dollop of disappointment and irritation.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
91
Guadagnino dredges up the dead with such crazed purpose that his magnum opus is able to dance through its rough spots and make good on its foreboding promise.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
The remake is never uninteresting. But it begets the question of whether the slender thread of story about a coven of witches operating out of a famed Berlin dance academy can withstand all the narrative detail, social context and cumbersome subplots heaped onto it.
100
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Emily Yoshida
Suspiria is a gorgeous, hideous, uncompromising film, and while it seeks to do many things, settling our minds about the brutality of the past and human nature is not one of them.
91
It’s a long, deliriously filmic, primal banshee-howl of macabre imagination that leaves us hormonal and drunk on delusion: the beautiful, thrilling, lurid lie of cinema.
100
It’s only hours afterward that Guadagnino’s film will cohere for you and yield its buried treasures: the bonds of secret sorority, the strength of a line of dancers moving like a single organism, the present rippling with the muscle memory of the past. It’s so good, it’s scary.
70
Suspiria has been made with enough skill to get inside your head, but enough ominous pretension to leave you scratching it.
60
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
There are smart moments of fear and subliminal shivers of disquiet, the dance sequences are good and of course Guadagnino could never be anything other than an intelligent film-maker. But this is a weirdly passionless film.
100
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
Dispassionate engagement won't fly here. You either stagger out early or plunge in up to your elbows.
80
Screen International by Tim Grierson
Suffice to say, Suspiria tries to do much, culminating in a finale that’s almost laughably over-the-top. But the passion of Guadagnino’s messy vision — the swirl of emotions he conjures on this grand canvas — has a forcefulness that mostly transcends its sizable flaws.
Guadagnino successfully directed a film that not only pays homage to the original 1977 film directed by David Argento, but moves the film in a fresh, new direction. Though Dakota Johnson is the lead, Tilda Swinton is the real star of this movie. She was perfectly cast for the role as the mysterious and talented Madame Blanc. The Scottish actress’ performance adds a sophistication which makes up for Dakota Johnson’s lackluster performance. Ironically, the horror and deaths were oddly beautiful and brilliantly terrifying. The film is beautifully scored by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and features impressive and beautiful cinematography. That being said the film does lack character development and the movie’s holocaust subplot feels shoehorned in.
While it does manage to deliver some delicious moments of intrigue and disgust, especially with its plentitude of intricately choreographed dance and torture scenes, Guadagnino’s Suspiria is ultimately bland. Delivered entirely in a sort of self-serious greyscale, this iteration fails most strongly in the sense that it lacks the characteristic giallo camp of the original. This is compounded by the Holocaust subplot, which is pretty ineffectively woven into the original’s main witchcraft narrative. However, I did greatly enjoy the integration of body horror into the main plotline as a marked departure from the original and thought that Guadagnino’s grotesque fascination with bones was a wonderfully visceral addition to the terror. I think it’s worth a watch, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Dario Argento’s.
I personally really loved this remake. Given Guadagnino's academic background as well as the overt references to Lacan and psychoanalysis this film makes, including the embroidered wall hanging in the very beginning of the film that reads "A Mother is a woman who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take", I thought it was interesting how the film explored the psychoanalytic idea that the place of the mother is a space where boundaries between self and other break apart - both in the idea of a witch coven where everyone can read each other's minds as well as dance as something that allows one to access the limits and maybe even transcend the limits of one's own physical boundaries.