Mother fucker

Suspiria (2018): It’s risky business remaking a sacred text, especially now as we are all acutely aware of the current deficiency of original content. To repurpose Daria Argento’s Suspiria is even more treacherous as it’s oft regarded the wicked mother of the great giallo tradition (I’m more of a Deep Red guy personally) regardless of what one might ultimately think of it. To interpret this vocation as an opportunity to deepen (Red Army Faction and Theresienstadtand transit camp), extend (50 minutes), stultify the color palette, and sooth the unsettling Goblin soundscape is bold to put it kindly. These are the things that seemingly made Suspiria what it was; the attributes that sparked Luca Guadagnino to chase his critical darling, Call Me By Your Name with a retelling of his lifelong object of horror affection. The divided reaction was foreseeable, and the squawking rarely wafted from cries of apostacy which sparked many telling and reactionary “I think the original is a mess” responses. Regardless, when a director decides to inherit the namesake, they must carry its weight like a specter. Luca’s movie shares much of Argentos threadbare plot though it spends much of its time with formerly ancillary characters. Suzy (Susie here) Bannon once again joins the Tanz Dance Academy (now Markos Dance Company) to dance amongst a coven of necromancers hoping to conjure/nurture an elder witch via female sacrifice. The aforementioned holocaust allusion is heaped on the back of Jozef Klemperer, a psychiatrist whose missing student belonged to said dance company. Her ramblings are prescribed as delusions which later sparks a cheap but opportune line of dialogue about believing women. Klemperer, whom it should be noted is one of three roles played by Tilda Swinton here looking like Grandpa Sawyer, spends most of his time investigating things that we have been explicitly shown, making the suspense kind of pointless. He is haunted by the loss of his wife which he is revealed to be complicit. She was a Jew who sought to flee the Third Reich but was convinced to stay by her husband until it was too late. Their tragic romance is cheaply exploited for an affixed emotional relevance, a register that Guadagnino juggles throughout. I don’t mean to sound sensitive, but this shoehorned addendum pissed me off. It ranks among the worst of sanctimonious virtue baiting I’ve seen in a filmscape full of moral opportunism. The real joy here is in the suffering, which at the very least is effectively unremitting when it wants to be. Suzy’s story involves a pilgrimage from a grim Mennonite existence to Berlin, illustrated via a child’s scribbling of hair on a map; a nice little bit of foretelling. We are privy to brief glimpses of her mother’s final moments, her crow rattle a looped sound bite during some of the most cliched nightmare imagery imaginable. Said matriarch brought to mind the zealots of Robert Eggers’ The VVitch; another modern horror hype vestige celebrated in some circles as a bold feminist text though accepting this would be accepting death and suffering well beyond the realm of what most of us consider actual merit. The plight from rural to urban is much like the journey from piety to paganism though rooting this freedom in witchcraft, especially the witchcraft rooted in hierarchy and allegiance punishable by death, is not much different from the legalist shackles of what most of us consider the Mennonite or Puritan faith. ----- I am aware that this is the point as one of the characters represents a new order which will usher in more a more merciful reign, which kinda takes the piss out of everything IMO ------ Susie moves up the ranks rather quickly, especially in the eyes of Madame Blanc (the only good Swinton performance here) who is one of the only witches who seems apprehensive about the impending Markos reign. Just as Germany was divided in 1977, so the coven can’t seem to agree on where they are going, though not a single witch is above murder or torture, especially to those who defy their power or go snooping around. One of the snoopers is Sara (Mia Goth), a character I wish the movie was built around, though this would mean doing away with the film’s final twist which would be just fine by me. Sara’s narrative takes over right before the final act (yes this movie is one of those with title card chapters) and ends cruelly and abruptly with nothing to show for it. The finale, which is inexplicably dominated by CG blood and a shitty slow-motion effect, attempts to shoehorn a little Argento in for good measure. It’s wackadoo to be sure, though after Panos Cosmatos’ sustained pandemonium in Mandy it feels like a cred-baiting afterthought. This felt especially true as Guadagnino couldn’t help himself but to return to real life atrocity and Thom York’s signature voice as penance. I guess the thing that has me perplexed is how the Argento movie had any impact on this guy? I understand that remakes come with the freedom of personal expression, but when these freedoms only wrought a new Radiohead record and some tethered social atrocities, I don’t think it’s worthy of the name Suspiria. I guess I’m just part of the old guard yelling “Markos!” awaiting my head to explode.