Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Suspiria’ is a worthy re-imagining of Dario Argento’s original slasher

The personal, political, physical and spiritual are all connected in the recent remake of the giallo classic.

Source: Transmission Films

Remaking a movie is always a fraught business, especially when the original model is as revered as Italian director Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo fever dream, Suspiria.

A key film in the

giallo subgenre of lurid slashers

, the original Suspiria followed a young ballet ingenue, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), who travels to Germany to study at a prestigious ballet academy, only to discover that the school is a front for a coven of bloodthirsty witches.

That is, more or less, the plot of Luca Guadagnino’s (Call Me By Your Name) 2018 remake. Except Guadagnino’s film, which he struggled to mount for a good 30 years after acquiring the rights back in the day, revels in its differences as much as its similarities, wringing new and complex thematic material from the same basic narrative.

Susie (Dakota Johnson) comes to study dance, but soon discovers there’s more going on. Source: Sandro Kopp

Set in Berlin in 1977, the year of the original film’s release, the 2018 Suspiria sees Dakota Johnson as Susie rather than Suzy, and like her predecessor she is newly arrived in Germany to study dance. The school she attends is also run by a coven of secretive, murderous witches. And that is where the parallels end.

Specific where Argento’s film is dreamlike, austere where it is lush, and pushing in many different directions at once, Guadagnino’s take defies easy summation. Various plot threads eventually cohere to give us a story about a power struggle within the coven, with Tilda Swinton’s Madame Blanc attempting to wrest power from the ancient and wizened Madame Markos (also Swinton under a ton of prosthetic make up), with Susie as the point on which their battle pivots.

Tilda Swinton in Suspiria as Doctor Klemperer (under a lot of makeup)

An almost unrecognisable Tilda Swinton as Doctor Klemperer. Source: Transmission Films

But plot isn’t everything, even if Suspiria has more than enough to go around (we haven’t yet touched upon Swinton’s third role as Doctor Klemperer, a male psychiatrist who begins investigating the school after treating one of its students, played by Chloe Grace Moretz). The real meat of the matter is Guadagnino’s thematic ambition, an exercise in narrative tapestry that connects the physical, political, artistic and spiritual in one labyrinthine but compelling pattern.

The physical and spiritual collide in ‘Suspiria’. Source: Transmission Films

The political clash between Blanc and Markos is rendered physical in the bodies of their victims, such as the student (Elena Fokina) whose body is ruptured and broken via a magical attack. The artistic and spiritual collide and intermingle throughout the film, with dance used as a kind of initiatory ritual – even when magic is not specifically invoked the movements of the dancers at the school are as ecstatic as whirling dervishes.

That past is entangled in the present not just in the form of the coven’s ancient rites and covert deities, but in the form of Doctor Klemperer, who is haunted by the loss of his wife during World War II. The personal struggles within the school mirror the political hothouse without, as late ‘70s Berlin is rocked by radical unrest. The whole thing culminates in a bloody, ritualistic apotheosis as Markos and Blanc’s internecine war reaches a horrific climax.

A dark moment for Tilda Swinton. Source: Transmission Films

Guadagnino’s Suspiria defies categorisation; indeed, it refutes the very concept, instead presenting a holistic and horrifying experience in which every discrete element is as important and portentous as any other. It’s a challenging work, not just because of its (literally, at times) visceral intensity and grand guignol horror set pieces, but because it asks us to view its story, its world – and by extension our world – in a different way.

In a conventional mystery we’re tasked with separating the wheat from the chaff, following a slim thread of truth through to the final credits. Suspiria instead demands that we consider every piece as vital to the greater whole, presenting a universe where the horrific and mystical are not intruding into the quotidian but are ever present just beneath the skin of the world, occasionally bursting through in a moment of bloody and terrifying revelation.