Review: Suspiria

Suspiria (18)

Italy/USA 2018 153 mins  Dir: Luca Guadagnino  Cast: Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, ‘Lutz Ebersdorf’, Angela Winkler, Ingrid Caven

There’s such a weight of expectation pressing down on classics that they risk disappointing newcomers. Their champions, meanwhile, guard these films’ reputations zealously. So any filmmaker foolish enough to attempt a remake is generally on a hiding to nothing. The reverential approach sparks well-founded accusations of pointlessness. (Anyone remember Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot version of Psycho? Thought not.) Any minor deviation, on the other hand, is likely to be greeted with howls of outrage from the self-appointed gatekeepers. The alternative, chosen here by Oscar-nominated Call My by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino for his fellow countryman Dario Argento’s Suspiria, is to go for broke with a complete makeover, or ‘cover version’ as Guadagnino prefers to term it, and damn the consequences.

Much-loved though it may be, Argento’s cult, primary-coloured 1977 horror is a feast of daft dialogue, ropy acting and dodgy plotting. Its magnificent score has provided Italian prog-rockers Goblin with a healthy international career that continues to this day. Guadagnino takes the bare bones of the storyline, bloats it with a surfeit of subplots and allusion, and replaces the Goblin score with – sacrilege! – a new one by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. The result is the most divisive horror flick since Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! Gorehounds who lose patience with the slowburning arthouse scene-setting should at least reserve judgement until the concluding gruesome horror wig-out, whose reliance on pleasingly old-school practical effects left this reviewer scanning the credits to check whether Screaming Mad George had any involvement (he didn’t).

We’re still in a German female dance academy run by a coven of witches. But the cumbersome subtitle ‘Six Acts and a Epilogue Set in a Divided Berlin’ provides an early warning of Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich’s intention to drag these hags upmarket for a cerebral, high-minded art movie laden with backstory. In an echo of the original film, this version is set during what appears to be a continuous downpour back in 1977. But the remake unfolds against a backdrop of unease and fear generated by the activities of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group. As if that wasn’t enough, the Holocaust is still sufficiently recent to haunt psychoanalyst Dr. Josef Klemperer, who’s billed as being played by real psychoanalyst Lutz Ebersdorf, but, as everyone knows by now, is actually Tilda Swinton under layers of impressive prosthetics. He’s treating babbling, damaged young dance student Patricia Hingle (Moretz), who asserts that the prestigious Helena Markos Dance Academy is run by a coven of witches who intend to “hollow me out and eat my cunt on a plate”. The main purpose of this prelude, however, seems to be to introduce an extended cameo by original Suspiria star Jessica Harper and offer a nudge and a wink to fans of that film and its sequels with references to Mother Suspiriorum, Mother Tenebrarum and Mother Lachryharum. Meanwhile, fresh-faced young American Mennonite runaway Susie (Johnson) impresses artistic director Madame Blanc (Swinton) with a visceral performance during an audition and swiftly becomes her protégé.

To develop Guadagnino’s cover version analogy, his Suspiria is rather like taking a brash three-minute rock song and expanding it into a full-on gatefold-sleeve prog-rock concept piece that climaxes with a gob-smacking Freebird-style triple guitar onslaught. Clearly, this will not be to all tastes, and those who argue that the central story struggles under the combined weight of all those layers of meaning have a point. Nonetheless, when this works, it works thrillingly. A bone-crunching sequence in a rehearsal room full of mirrors is superbly choreographed and certain to have audiences wincing in sympathy. Casting off the shackles of the wretched Fifty Shades… franchise, Dakota Johnson gives a terrific central performance and is entirely convincing during those gruelling dance sequences. As one might expect, Tilda Swinton is magnificent in all three of her roles, especially as the severe, chain-smoking Madame Blanc, in which she scales heights of froideur previously charted only by Isabelle Huppert.

As if to distance himself from the tone of the original film, Guadagnino rather self-consciously dials everything down. The colour palette is decidedly muted, while Thom Yorke’s score is intermittently effective but much more restrained than Goblin’s pounding version. Then, as if suddenly remembering that he’s supposed to be making a horror film after all that heavy contextualising, he unleashes such a last reel avalanche of grue that the arthouse crowd may struggle to avoid a fit of the giggles.