Which Witch Dreams in Suspiria?
Guadagnino was primed for success. Call Me by Your Name was a hit. Everyone loved Argento. Witches were in again! This movie had Tilda Swinton. This movie had Tilda Swinton in a prosthetic penis!
I can’t stay awake through a movie. Or, more accurately, I can’t stay awake through a movie if we start it after 9.
When MoviePass still prevailed, I made it my mission to rack up as many viewings a month, on less than ten dollars. Sometimes this had me dragging my friends to 9 PM screenings after work. This was how I ended up sleeping in the theater through the chaos of Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 adaptation of Suspiria.
The film released to great anticipation. Guadagnino was riding the wave of Call Me by Your Name’s success, and his aesthetic eye seemed promising as it reimagined Dario Argento’s 1977 cult favorite. In phantasmagoric washes of scarlet and indigo, Argento’s film tells the story of Suzy Bannion, a dancer from the States who’s just touched down in Freiburg to dance at Madame Blanc’s acclaimed academy. She arrives on a stormy night and soon, sensing trouble afoot, begins sleuthing through the school with her new friend Sara. They discover Madame Blanc and her cohort of ballerinas are, in fact, witches, matriarchs preying on the young dancers.
Guadagnino was primed for success. Call Me by Your Name was a hit. Everyone loved Argento. Witches were in again! This movie had Tilda Swinton. This movie had Tilda Swinton in a prosthetic penis!
It seemed like exactly the movie my friends and I would want to kick off our spooky season. A year ago, we’d named a weekend in October “Witchy Weekend.” We lived in Portland, Maine, and drank cocktails in highlighter hues at the witchy bar, watched The Witch, and road-tripped to Salem for a day. This October, we didn’t have grand plans, so Suspiria would have to suffice.
And yet.
I was asleep within the first hour. I didn’t take it as a particular reflection on the film at first. I’d also fallen asleep in the theater when we saw First Reformed, and I liked that one a lot.
When we emerged from the theater, my friends were divided. We debated over drinks, and I was mostly quiet, hoping to hide that I’d slept through a significant twenty of this film I’d dragged them to. We could all agree it was long–two and a half hours of Guadagnino’s playtime. Argento’s original was a trim hour and forty.
The color palette of the original seems to show up biweekly on a cinephile Instagram account I follow. In slideshow posts, they showcase color swatches of dreamy movie shots. Almost all include at least one from Suspiria: the indigo and cyan curtains pulled back behind Suzy, holding a knife, or the geometric pink and white academy lobby. Guadagnino’s interpretation is more muted, pulling from an imagination of 1970s Berlin in beige, tan, and the occasional maroon.
Though the palette whispers about a Berlin divided, nothing else in the film seems to work so subtly. Its most arresting shots depict the dancers in one studio, practicing their piece “Volk”. Oftentimes, the sound mixing is a bit off, capturing whooshes of fabrics and curtains, bodies slicing through studio air, with uncanny focus. While the women practice, the academy’s instructors, all witches, relish deep breaths and long gazes. Through dance, they enact magic against their students who speak out, sensing witchcraft. The dissidents are secreted away to private chambers where their bodies are twisted, mangled, and snapped, ejecting horrific bodily fluids. The shots are brutal, but the dance is arresting. It’s something of a wonder I could fall asleep through it.
Buzz around the film redirected as reviewers weighed in. The film boasts an almost exclusively female cast, with stars like Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Mia Goth, and Chloë Grace Moretz. Yet, as a modern interpretation of witchcraft in the age of #MeToo, the narrative tethers to revenge and redemption for the lone male character, Dr. Klemperer, incidentally played by Tilda Swinton under an alias, Professor Lutz Ebersdorf.
In his review for The New Yorker, “Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Suspiria’ is the Cinematic Equivalent of a Designer Che T-Shirt,” Richard Brody says, “ ‘Suspiria’ is full of disconnected, static, but attention-getting, details of vast historical import, and these adornments’ function is far more insidious than mere virtue-signalling or pride. 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.”
The film is loud. It’s haunted by the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall outside the academy. Dr. Klemperer seeks to reconnect with his wife, whom he abandoned in East Berlin. Outside the academy, plane hijackings and the Red Army Faction create a general stir of chaos that muddles the witches’ motives and endgame.
Brody adds, “The Wikipedic superficiality and political frivolity with which these grand historical and psychological themes are applied to the gory drama are matched by the appropriation of a few jingling baubles of feminist dialogue meant to get viewers hungry for ‘substance’ to salivate.” Everything thrown into the movie goes underdeveloped and is presented in the abstract.
The film is chaos without concern, bric-a-brac for us to sift through. If we assemble the right pieces, we can find the true meaning. We just have to ignore all the other pieces we pick through as we go.
I fall asleep almost every night on the couch. It’s an unreliable metric for me to interpret films. Yet, something has pulled me back to this movie. I watched it again months later. Perhaps it appeals to my taste for uncovering mystery, decoding enigmas. It unleashes loose readings that are energizing to pursue. The conspiracy theorist in me can say what I want about the movie and it’s probably right.
