Review: Suspiria (2018)

 

Set in the late 70s, Ohio-born Dakota Fanning arrives in West Berlin in hopes of admittance into the Markos Dance Academy. Academy director Miss Blanc (Tilda Swinton) reluctantly accepts the novice, and soon enough starts to see something in her new pupil. Meanwhile, it appears several of the students have started to go missing, with rumours of witchcraft circulating as well. Mia Goth plays a fellow student, Chloe Grace Moretz plays a troubled former student, and Jessica Harper turns up briefly as well in a cameo.

 

No one needed a remake of Dario Argento’s iconic “Suspiria”. It’s not my favourite of his films (I prefer “Inferno”), but it still works perfectly fine. It definitely didn’t need to be turned into a 2 ½ hour dance drama with psychological and supernatural horror elements, that’s for damn sure. While this arty-farty 2018 remake from director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name”) and screenwriter David Kajganich (the underrated “Blood Creek” and “True Story”) features a somewhat similarly visually dynamic camera style to the original, it is a much, much lesser experience.

 

Although it shares the bare bones of the (rather bare bones to begin with) plot of the original, it feels like overall the showy filmmaking style is at complete odds with the script’s greater focus on drama than horror – not to mention that the grossly indulgent length is at odds with just about everything here. It just doesn’t work. I also think the dynamic camerawork by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (“Call Me By Your Name”) is rather at odds with the film’s overall drab production design, which is a bit strange to me. Rather than “Suspiria” the film reminded me more of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” set at a dance academy. “Suspiria” was never meant to be about a dance academy, it’s a story of murder and a witches’ coven that is simply set at a dance academy. Yes, we get more of a sense early on about the coven than we did with the Argento film, but the overall main focus is very much away from that for far too long. It doesn’t even reach “Black Swan” levels of psychodrama, it's much flatter than that despite the surface visual and audio (via composer Thom Yorke) presentation.

 

Also, for a film taking a dramatic rather than horrific approach, the characters are simply too dull to care about. I felt both Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton were well-cast here (Swinton was born to play a dance instructor and Satanist, with all due respect) and do good work in a losing effort. I also have to admire a certain someone’s secondary efforts, aided by great makeup (Actually they play three roles, but the third part is fairly minor). It’s just a shame that the character is a rather dull one. I was less impressed by Chloe Grace Moretz, who I found overly mannered and completely inept at what she thought she was doing in the part.

 

In the second half we get some horrific moments, including one of the most bizarre, creative, and truly disgusting death scenes in any film you’ll see. I’m still struggling to figure out how in the hell it was done. If we’d gotten much more of that throughout, this might’ve been something worthwhile (though the editing is too MTV for my taste). Instead it’s dull and glacial-paced, and what a waste of Jessica Harper in a tiny role!

 

You can either remake a film with great fidelity or go in a different direction, either way it has to be good/better or else you end up looking like an idiot. This mostly boring-arse film looks like a damn fool. The less you know about the original the more you may get out of this film. If you’ve seen the original, you’ll keep trying to find it here and it’s not easy. “Suspiria” was never meant to be an epic-length psychodrama, nor was it meant to look so drab and muted in colour palette. Why bother remaking something only to go so far in a different direction – and largely fail at making that work anyway? Some of it is weird, occasionally interesting, and quite disgusting. A lot of it is boring as hell. The camerawork and performances by Johnson and Swinton give this one its only real life. A big misfire.

 

Rating: C