TELESCOPE
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Suspiria
Italy, United States
·2018
Rated R · 2h 32m
Director Luca Guadagnino
Starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Angela Winkler
Genre Horror, Fantasy
A darkness swirls at the center of a world-renowned dance company, one that will engulf the troupe's artistic director, an ambitious young dancer and a grieving psychotherapist. Some will succumb to the nightmare, others will finally wake up.
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USERS WHO LIKED THIS FILM ALSO LIKED
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WHAT ARE PEOPLE SAYING?
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.
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WHAT ARE CRITICS SAYING?
TheWrap by Alonso Duralde
IndieWire by David Ehrlich
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Emily Yoshida
The Playlist by Jessica Kiang
Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf
Variety by Owen Gleiberman
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
Screen International by Tim Grierson