Suspiria

2018 remake

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Witches at a dance studio scheme to get power.

I haven't seen the Argento version of this witchy dance-off in a decade and can really only remember that it's violent and has a lot of color. This remake's got the violence, but strangely, the colors are almost drained from it. It's like a sickly Suspiria, or a deceased one on a table at a morgue, like Luca Guadagnino is making a conscious effort to make this look as pale as possible. The cinematography is gorgeous, and there are some moments where colors really pop and make this look like what one might expect from a remake of Suspiria. A climactic dance sequence with loads of reds and whites is especially evocative, edited in a way to make it feel like the audience is being stabbed to death. The most impressive visual moments are some sharply edited dream sequences that were just breathtakingly horrifying.

Speaking of horror, it's hard to label this a horror movie. It's hard to figure out what this is actually. It's artsy-fartsy, but some very silly moments really made it difficult for me to take it all seriously. At times, I wasn't sure if things were supposed to be funny or not. It's a puzzling movie, one that requires you to put pieces together while assuming a dog or something has already eaten a few of them, but it's sort of puzzling in a superficial or artificial way, almost like Guadagnino is being deliberately opaque because he thinks it'll give him street cred with the avant-garde crowd or something. I'm sure some scenes in this are intentionally funny, but some moments when Suspiria wanted me to take it seriously made me roll my eyes.

Allusions to terrorist activity from the late-70's was confusing, and attempts to link this whole thing thematically with past German sins actually seemed a little offensive or, at the very least, cheap. Throw in Cold War references with frequent shots of the Berlin Wall, halfhearted feminism, witch power struggles, an unclear narrative perspective, shifting protagonists, and pointless flashbacks, and you almost forget this is a movie about witches at a dance studio. There are individual parts to enjoy, but as a whole, it's really hard to like this bloated mess of a movie.

Dakota Johnson's had herself an interesting year, hasn't she?