Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a confrontation, a bold and unsettling film that ultimately concaves upon itself by its own pretensions. The project has been a long gestating staple of Hollywood for quite a while. Initially David Gordon Greene was set to direct a version and then he backed out to remake Halloween. There is no way that the other iterations of the script were this overstuffed. Guadagnino takes the base elements of Dario Argento’s Giallo classic and piles ingredient upon ingredient until there is a cornucopia of themes that are half-heartedly explored.
Dakota Johnson plays Susie Bannon, a young American woman in 1977 with no formal dance training that travels to Germany and quickly ascends to the top of a premiere dance company in Berlin led by Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). The longer she is there the more she begins to suss out the strange underpinnings of this school and company.
Concurrently, there is an elderly doctor, Josef Klemperer (also played by Swinton), that is investigating the school after his patient Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), goes missing from the institution. These two threads interweave through the running time, sometimes more effectively than others, but by the end they do manage to establish a few interesting questions that the movie doesn’t really care to answer.
But, Guadagnino’s film isn’t really about answers to unsolvable questions. Dr. Klemperer is a Holocaust survivor, and by the final scene he is plagued with more doubt and uncertainty than when he started out on his quest to locate Patricia. This storyline is one that is completely original to this version and the narrative certainly feels the strain of an added story.
The Klemperer plot line on its own is compelling and does extract more nuance from the main arc of the film. Without the Klemperer material, the story would be of rivalries and horror within this dance company, but with it the film becomes a question of Germany’s post-World War II identity.
This is where the film missteps gravely. Guadagnino is fascinated with cultural identity and how individuals fit within the larger mechanism of reality. His last film, Call Me by Your Name, examines these questions with depth and sensitivity, but here he burdens the film with excessive themes and tries to force a square peg into a round whole. The pieces are all interesting on their own, yet when placed together they add more fractured questions.
There is a technical bravura to every moment of Suspiria. Thom Yorke’s score is equally chilling and emotional. There are moments of atonality that match the washed out and muted color palette on display. Guadagnino, working with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, creates a cool dispassionate Berlin that is still divided by the Berlin wall. That wall rests just outside the glass windows of the school and becomes a focal point of the action. This is another symbol that strains for relevance, but serves as a constant reminder that the action of the story isn’t up to the task to examine in totality what that loaded visage means to the school, or more importantly, Germany and the world at large.
But, the virtuosity of everyone behind the camera makes this film more of a disappointment than anything else. Like many films with great technicians at the helm, the movie is never boring. The best sequence of the film comes when Susie dances with the company for the first time. Her movements dictate another character’s motion and by the end that character has been crumbled into an amalgamation of bent bones and stretched skin. Guadagnino lets the body horror play out in long enough intervals that allows the audience to see the contortions take their affect. The scene works so well because unlike much of the film, the action on display is hitting several emotional beats at once. The dance by Susie harness the violence of the art at the heart of what Madame Blanc’s ballet is about. But, simultaneously it shows the pain and endurance these dancers must put themselves through on a daily basis.
Cardinal amongst all the sins, the movie isn’t particularly scary. When we finally reach the climactic scene in the bowels of the school, there is a sheer insanity to the visuals, but there is no terror. Guadagnino literally paints the screen with blood for aesthetics, symbolism, yet not to scare. If there is fear to take away from Suspiria, it comes in the cold undertones of the movie and how it slowly evokes feelings of violence on an individual and national stage.
While nothing ever coheres, the movie is tough to shake. The questions it asks oddly fit together, but they do ring truth to today’s fractured political environment. Guadagnino’s trick of having the only significant male character played by a woman, is a key to the movie in a lot of ways. He’s directly confronting the audience with the futility of men in a world that has no use for the patriarchy anymore. The women of this dance company have made their own society with rules and governance, and it only crumbles when an outside force interferes. Then, the movie becomes something of a treatise on violence and guilt that never sticks. This is the piece that drew Guadagnino to the project I suspect. It’s also the piece that makes the movie a frustrating piece of art. It is an interesting abnormality in his career, nowhere close to perfect, but it needs to be reckoned with. Some will see the provocations of the film and pull meaning to them, in the end I think they are just empty queries that he overextended himself in trying to answer.