At the end of Luca Guadagnino’s interpretation of the Dario Argento classic giallo, Suspiria, an audience member balks, “That was so bad.” It would seem this is, overall, the sentiment of many who feel they were “duped” into watching a “faux,” overly wrought art house thriller. As critic Richard (Dick, if you will) Brody of The New Yorker remarked of Guadagnino’s stylized plot devices and visuals, “They are bait for critical vanity, handing critics toys to play with, toys that can be defended as educational while offering little substance and less thought.” It would seem that Guadagnino accordingly anticipated such a response with one of the “Mothers” of the coven–Helena Markos (one of three roles played by Tilda Swinton) herself–screaming at Madame Blanc (also Swinton, for an ultra meta effect), “This isn’t vanity, this is art!” as they squabble over the handling of newcomer Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), eventually appearing in a scene possibly extrapolated from the album cover of Björk’s Vulnicura.
Just a (seemingly) wide-eyed, fresh off the boat ingenue from Ohio, Susie is very eager to please, her admiration for Madame Blanc being deep-seated, as she later confesses to her that she snuck away from her Amish family three times to see the dance Blanc choreographed, Volk, in New York. A tribute to the generational guilt inherited by Germany after the Second World War, Blanc is committed to maintaining the exact choreography without making any changes, as brazenly suggested by Susie, who does not wish to do the jumps in the air desired, but remain close to the ground (in part an influence of wanting to be closer to Satan/Helena). Blanc tersely informs her, “You’re confusing physical weakness with artistic preference.” So it is that she brutally extracts one of the other girls’ talents in the art of jumping (in one of the tamer scenes of violence and sexuality) to imbue Susie with for her performance in the lead.
That Susie instantly takes the place of Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz) in so many ways–occupying her former room and dance role–causes offense to some, especially fellow dancer Olga (Elena Fokina), who is convinced Patricia’s disappearance involved foul play and that Madame Blanc and the other matrons are not taking it seriously enough. After her outburst over this matter on Susie’s first day in class, Olga’s grim and graphic fate is sealed in one of the first of many hard to watch scenes of bodily annihilation. It was a fate Patricia tried to forewarn of, particularly to her psychoanalyst, Dr. Josef Klemperer (also Swinton, under the alias Lutz Ebersdorf), a foreboding scene in act one of the film spotlighting just how seldom women are taken seriously with their “claims,” deemed, at best, embellishments by men. Dr. Klemperer’s lack of faith in Patricia telling the truth comes back to haunt him later, when one of the matrons overpowering him snaps, “When women tell you the truth, you don’t pity them. You tell them they have delusions.” This accusation cuts particularly deep for Klemperer, who lost his wife during the Nazi occupation of Germany and has forever felt responsible for that loss and unknowing of her true fate. As Dr. Klemperer becomes increasingly enmeshed in the bizarre occurrences at the school, he tries his best to fathom and repackage what Patricia was telling him by noting, “Delusions are lies that tell the truth.” That Swinton plays the part of a man–this particular man–is not without deliberateness, for Dr. Klemperer is haunted and embodied by the spirit of his possibly deceased long lost wife, Anke Meier (Jessica Harper, who played Johnson’s part in the original as Suzy, not Susie).
Because Suspiria is told in a far more simultaneously fragmented yet cohesive way than the original, we catch glimpses of what feels like the past, featuring Susie’s own mother, while dying (though this is said to be happening concurrently), who confesses that her daughter is her sin upon the earth, as though always knowing that there was something inherently evil about her. A close-up on a frame with the old platitude, “A mother is a woman who can take the place of all others, but whose place no one else can take,” toward the beginning of the movie proves telling indeed, for the title and job description of “mother” in Suspiria takes on many incarnations, few of them very nurturing. In point of fact, another misunderstood and largely panned film, mother!, would be a fitting companion piece to watch with this version of Suspiria (depending on how much fucked uppedness your mind can endure in one sitting).
Intentionally highlighting the events of the year that Suspiria originally came out in, 1977, Guadagnino interweaves key moments from the German Autumn (including the hijacking of the Lufthansa plane called Landshut by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) against the equally as undercuttingly frenetic setting of the Helena Markos-run dance school–called Tanz–in a divided Berlin (in the original, it’s Munich). To this end, as usual, it would seem that at least certain artists would like to remind us all that for as horrific as it feels now, politically speaking, there have been far more chaotic, lawless moments in history that we ought to take pause to reflect on for a bit of perspective.
There are layers of revolution–the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon pairing up perfectly with the insidious insurgency within the coven itself–that Guadagnino makes no bones about hiding. There are other bones he does not hide either, with protrusions of certain dancers’ innards being just par for the course of the screenplay, written by David Kajganich, who also penned the Guadagnino-directed A Bigger Splash. It is Susie’s roommate, Sara (Mia Goth), who is a prime example of this manifestation of physical demise. A metaphor for the accepted ease with which a woman should sacrifice her body to “a cause” (again, pertinent to the tumultuous fall the story is set in). In Sara’s case, it is, theoretically, to dance. A wicked dance that all serves to conjure and connect with that which is evil (images and movements of which get across via the sinister choreography of Damien Jalet).
As the trajectory of the narrative becomes increasingly macabre, it can be said that to perhaps aid with the mainstream palatability of Suspiria, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke was tapped to create the soundtrack–inevitable hipster kryptonite. While Yorke is a completely different musical animal than Goblin, his work is still almost impossible to be a match for the latter in terms of the brilliance of the original film’s score–though Yorke’s compositions are interwoven quite seamlessly.
In a far more twisted twist in the final act (of which there are six, plus an epilogue–it almost makes one think of Tarantino) of this Suspiria (cited as homage rather than full-fledged remake, to be clear), we see that Susie is not so innocent in all of the goings-on, resulting in one of the most debauched and haunting scenes in recent cinema history, during which she happily declares, “Death to any other mother,” bringing everything full-circle in terms of her own overt contempt for the oppressive biological one she had. But then, one shouldn’t be so hard on Mother, for “love and manipulation often share the same houses.”
At the end of the credits, the image of Mother Suspiriorum making the same gesture as she did to Klemperer to the audience suggests that she would like us to forget about it all as well. Especially if certain audience members were too daft to see that this film is art as fuck.
