Review: Suspiria

Image courtesy of Amazon Studios.

Much more of an homage than a remake, Luca Guadagnino's reimagining of Dario Argento's 1977 horror masterpiece "Suspiria" is a bit too long, extremely violent, much more visually muted than the colorful original, extremely odd, ambitious and, in its final moments, deliriously over the top. It's a film that I'd recommend, although the picture is meant to be divisive and one's enjoyment of it might depend on whether one buys the historical context that was missing in Argento's original film, but is ever-present here.

Clocking in at two-and-a-half hours, "Suspiria" takes some patience. At the film's beginning, we are told that the picture will present "Six Acts and an Epilogue in Divided Germany." While Argento's garish original film was marked by its frequent, brightly colored splashes of blood, Guadagnino's version has a muted visual style that recalls the work of Rainer Werner Fassbender.

It also includes a political and historical context - and, perhaps, a questionable one - that was nowhere to be found in the original. For starters, the ballerina school in which this new version is set is located directly across from the Berlin Wall, which the filmmakers mistakenly believe acts as some sort of statement by sheer inclusion alone.

But there's also an elderly man named Dr. Josef Klemperer (I'll allow you to be surprised to see who plays this part) who acts as the film's detective, and once lost a wife to the Nazis after he failed to act years before and flee the country in time. And the filmmakers make a curious choice of allowing the exploits of the notorious Baader Meinhof Complex, a left wing terrorist organization, to play out in news reports in the background. What exactly, you might ask, is the purpose of all this context in a film about a coven of witches running a ballet school for sinister reasons? The film only occasionally provides answers.

The characters' names are mostly similar to those of the original. Dakota Johnson fills in for Jessica Harper - who makes a cameo here - in the role of Susie Bannion, a former Mennonite with an abusive mother whose talents catch the attention of the school's visionary leader, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), during a rehearsal. Soon, Susie has become the lead dancer in "Volk," a frenetic piece created by Blanc in 1948 that is going through the rehearsal stages for its final performance.

Meanwhile, Kemperer is investigating the disappearance of Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz) - a ballerina whom we meet in the film's opening chapter before she disappears. Patricia is believed to have gotten mixed up with Baader Meinhof, although Kemperer is skeptical. Patricia previously had the lead in "Volk," and as the film opens she is trying to convince the elderly man that the ballet school's teachers are all witches who have menacing designs on Patricia.

While "Suspiria" often takes too long getting to where it is going, it casts a creepy spell and is filled with stunning - and occasionally shocking - imagery: a woman floating up a wall, psychedelic nightmares, intestines being pulled from a stomach and a Grand Guignol ending that would be at home in a work by Hieronymus Bosch. There's a particularly grueling sequence during which Susie's dance moves are, for reasons mostly left to the imagination, the cause of another young dancer's body being twisted and snapped into a pretzel beyond her control.

While the filmmakers' choices - from the political and historical context to the meaning behind the wild finale - are somewhat mysterious, it seems obvious that this new "Suspiria" is fixated on the perversion of power. At the ballet school, the teachers are using the bodies of the young women for nefarious purposes, and there's a line of some thematic interest spoken to Kemperer - regarding his wife's failed attempt to flee from Nazi-occupied Germany - about believing a woman when she tells you that she's in danger.

Although the purpose behind some of the film's choices remain obscured, "Suspiria" is a mostly bewitching homage to Argento's nightmarish original. As is typically the case, it is not as good as the original, but it's a worthy attempt to capture the ambience of that Italian director's oeuvre. And it also serves as a noteworthy break from the high-minded arthouse films one would typically expect from Guadagnino - such as "I Am Love" and last year's wonderful "Call Me By Your Name" - to allow the director to engage in some genre exploration. Overall, "Suspiria" casts an imperfect, but unsettling, spell.