Women, get ready for your cycles to sync! Men, get ready to feel irrelevant and uncomfortable! Everyone, prepare to wonder if the grandiose, glamorous grotesquerie of the seamy yet swanky new “Suspiria” can possibly come from the same director who fastidiously panned away to the curtains during the sex scene in “Call Me By Your Name“! Not that there’s any actual sex in Luca Guadagnino‘s reinvented distant-cousin of Dario Argento‘s 1977 cult bauble. But then, given that it is all about seduction, submission, domination, reproduction and the writhing of limber bodies in agonized ecstasy and ecstatic agony, maybe it’s all about sex. It certainly does play out as high-class horror-porn, and I mean that as an immense, tumescent compliment. “Suspiria,” (to an almost alarming thematic degree as well as everything else) is this Venice’s “mother!” in that it will rip the critical corpus apart from the chest out, will likely receive an F Cinemascore and will get a review here that is essentially me writhing around on its slick, gory parquet floors scrawling superlatives on the wall-mirrors in its blood and bashing myself to livid euphoric oblivion against my own distorted reflection. (I loved it, in case I’m not clear).
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Only the slenderest central storyline remains from the original: a naive American girl is granted a scholarship to an exclusive, and exclusively female, Berlin dance academy that turns out to be run by a coven of witches. But in every direction Guadagnino and an all-star team of collaborators spin elaborate trails that lead back to the Holocaust, across the world to a Mennonite community in Ohio, out into the “divided Berlin of 1977” with its ongoing Baader-Meinhof hostage crisis, further beyond into the world of men who have neglected, betrayed, disappointed and misunderstood their women for millennia and also down, deep down into a Boschian idea of hell, or whatever ancient, unknowable entity pre-existed such a relatively modish notion. The story of “Suspiria” is a tangled web, much like that which hangs over a certain underground lair where footless freaks and the mottled fleshsacks of what used to be young women are trapped in moaning misery beneath canopies of rope knotted into complicated cosmic cats-cradles. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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Dakota Johnson, lithe in both her physicality and her ability to turn on a dime from timid and sweet to sly and commanding, plays Susie, the newcomer fleeing her “American Gothic”-style upbringing, who arrives in a low-skied, rainswept, gray Berlin (reuniting with “Call Me By Your Name” DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Guadagnino only uses Argento’s signature red filters sparingly, and mostly keeps the palette muted). She dances for Mme Blanc (possibly the Tilda Swintonest Tilda Swinton we’ve seen, costumed to severe perfection) and is admitted, though there are rumblings that Blanc is mounting a power move against the academy founder and namesake, the seldom-glimpsed “Mother” Markos. And the girls, even the sensible and friendly Sara (an excellent Mia Goth) are disquieted too by the disappearance of Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz) whom we’ve already seen babbling about witches and climbing the walls in the study of her kindly elderly shrink, Dr Josef Klemperer (Lutz Ebersdorf, because that’s 100% who he is and not someone else in heavy prosthetics).
Soon Susie is having nightmares (stunning montages of earthworms, Ohio farmhouses, toilets clogged with hair and an odd prismatic light that skitters down dark hallways). Yet her ambition and preternatural talent drive her rapid rise within the corps, though she’s seemingly unaware that when she first dances “Volk,” the signature Markos Academy piece (imagine Pina Bausch choreographing a non-penetrative “Salò“), with every move she makes, elsewhere a disobedient dancer is being thrashed and broken and tossed about like some ghastly doll in a voodoo ritual.
This sequence is, quite simply, incredible, deriving its visceral impact from editing and practical effects so that while it is stomach-churningly gory (oh the sound design of snapping bones and grinding gristle playing off the sighs and gasps and shucking fabric of the dancers above!), it’s also beautiful. Which is really Guadagnino’s approach overall: Though split focus diopters, crash zooms, color filters and a stuttering slo-mo that leaves an aurora of motion behind it, do all appear, these potentially tacky effects are used sparingly, perhaps in playful tribute to the excesses of the original. Mostly, the director’s instinct, complemented by Thom Yorke‘s plaintive, comparatively pared-back score, is to beautify and render elegant the freakshow he is creating in-camera. It makes “Suspiria” oddly hilarious, as well as deliciously confusing to the eye: the images are gorgeous; what they are of is repellent, and one’s reaction is often off-balance, horrified, admiring laughter.
In fact, the film is so good at creating a warped, immersive, weirdo reality of its own that perhaps the only major misstep is the attempt to graft it onto history. The Holocaust has long since been used, cinematically, as an almost-mythic, collective-unconscious backdrop against which themes of guilt and complicity can be writ large. But the splicing of the film into the real 1977 Baader-Meinhof affair never quite gels in the same way: the details of that event are too specific, to little understood and too messily real to be similarly useful as shorthand.
It’s a minor point though. “Delusion,” Klemperer tells Sara at one point “is a lie that tells the truth.” And though the idea of delusion is snarlingly dismissed as the creation of men who use it to categorize elements of the feminine that they cannot understand, it is also fundamental to the potent, witty admixture of ideas — some less well-developed than others — that pumps like pretty poison through “Suspiria”‘s veins. And it is further reminiscent of Haneke’s famous assertion that film is a lie told 24 times per second in search of the truth — which is maybe, instead of all the weightier notions “Suspiria” might toy with, where it works best: As a long, deliriously filmic, primal banshee-howl of macabre imagination that leaves us hormonal and drunk on that lovely delusion: the beautiful, thrilling, lurid lie of cinema. [A-]
Check out all our coverage from the 2018 Venice Film Festival here.