Suspiria (2018) is a remake, homage, whatever of Italian director Dario Argento’s 1977 version. There’s been a lot of hot debates about which one is better, and whether Luca Guadagnino’s version is an “atrocity” against the original, and if Luca Guadagnino “took a big, steaming shit on the original”, and if it’s “an offense to filmmaking across the globe, but especially a middle finger to Dario Argento and fans of the original directly, like a middle finger aimed directly at them.” I’m not here to enter this debate, since I liked them pretty much equally at the end of the day, but I do think it’s important to discuss their similarities and differences. At the same time, I want to talk about Luca’s movie on its own, so in the first part I’ll be talking about Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria on its own, and in the second part I’ll be talking about both of them.

For those not indoctrinated to the SUSPIRIA ethos, both movies, at their base, are about an American newcomer entering a prestigious European dance school. And while everything seems normal at first, there may be something lurking beneath the surface…

Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a bit long, and bloated, for no particularly good reason. There’s the main plot following Susie, a new dancer at the Markos school (the interesting stuff), and a subplot following a Dr. Klemperer as he does… stuff? His entire subplot is wasted space — seemingly serving only to accommodate the changed setting from the original (from Italy to Berlin during the Cold War). Whoever played the doctor had a great performance, the problem is his inclusion beefs this movie up to around the 2 and a half hour mark, when the movie would’ve been more engaging without him.

There are a lot of scenes in this that are uncomfortable to watch and I loved that. While the director of the original, Dario Argento, said Luca’s version contained “little fear,” I found it significantly creepier and scarier than the original. This is partially a time difference, but whereas the original often felt like an old horror movie (because it is!), Luca’s trends closer to the dreadier style of modern art-horror movies, which I like a lot. There are whole sequences in this that I watched through my hands because of how gross they were, which is to say it is a violent movie, and I wasn’t expecting it, but it’s done to good effect. Luca also has a tendency towards close-ups that linger an uncomfortably long time, which, again, were great.

I haven’t seen any of Guadagnino’s other movies, but his direction here is very good. The performances are great, and I found the writing very engaging (except for the doctor). There are also a lot of shots that sometimes only last seconds that were very strong visually (one of these ended up being the blu-ray cover, wow!). That said, it is a devastatingly ugly movie. There’ll be more on this in the comparison section, but for now, I’ll just say the color palette is a muted brown/ army green. The world feels very lifeless and bleak as a result, and I can’t say it’s really to good effect. One can imagine how visually stunning this movie would’ve been if they hadn’t drained out the color for God knows why.

I think there’s a lot of material here for those of you into dance (more art-dance or however you’d call specifically artistic dance). I was watching it and thinking, ‘oh some of that looks really intricate — I’m guessing I’d have a much greater appreciation of it if I knew literally anything about dance’. Without that it’s cool enough to watch, I just imagine it’s cooler if you’re into that.

The soundtrack is fantastic — there are lots of creepy, atmosphere-setting pieces that I thought set a really dreadful tone. On the other hand, every now and then Thom Yorke would show up in a song to sing words and I thought that sucked. I get that Thom Yorke is a singer OR WHATEVER, but man, Yorke’s (hot take) whiny vocals really took me out of it a few times. There’s one time it happens that I found particularly egregious given the visual context of said song. Shut up Thom! I’m watching a movie here dude.

‘Dude’ being another aspect of this movie, since it’s directed and scored by men but starring almost exclusively women. Guadagnino said in an interview that he wanted this movie to be a “fierce showcase of the female artistic experience” and Thom Yorke said he was drawn to the script’s “feminine collective energy”, whatever the fuck that means. I think there are a lot better people to write about the themes of female empowerment or whatever than me, but I do want to say a couple things. Firstly,”feminine collective energy”????? Secondly, the fact that the infrastructure of the film industry sets up movies that ‘are’ a “fierce showcase of the female artistic experience” to be directed by a man is a bit sad. It’s not that I think it can’t be done, I just think it’s interesting that Luca set-out to do that, almost as like a gift to women. ‘Hey women, here’s an ode to your, uhh, feminine collective energy, by me, a guy’. It reminds me of Tarantino’s Django Unchained and his, maybe well-meaning?, desire to ‘give’ black men an idol to look up to. I don’t know, it’s all kinda weird. I just thought it was worth mentioning since they thought it was worth mentioning.

Alright, now I want to touch on the original and the remake. I just saw the original around a week ago, so I’m pretty new to it. I thought it was alright — it does some things really well (the cinematography is great, the colors are great), but plot-wise it felt like a children’s book, complete with an ending that was almost offensively simple. Given the visual flair and performances though, I can absolutely see why it became a cult classic. There is something very attractive about it.

Guadagnino refers to his version as an ‘homage’, and I read a few reviews that implied that all Guadagnino took was the initial premise of a dance school. No, there’s a lot more here than homage and a school. There are identical characters and a plot that has a lot in common with the original. Let it be said that there ARE very different plots and characters in this, but they are not so different as to be un-recognizable by fans of the original.

That said, he changed the setting, to Berlin, for some reason. In the original, the setting barely played a role at all. In fact, BECAUSE there isn’t really a world outside of the school, it creates this weirdly claustrophobic sense because all we really know is the school, and it’s the same for our main character. In Guadagnino’s, a very large portion of the movie is dedicated the new setting of Berlin during the Cold War. This setting ends up being mostly irrelevant, despite being very present for the duration of the movie. There are characters caught up in the radical politics of West Berlin, and an entire subplot revolving around a German doctor I guess, but it’s never clear to me the relevance of the setting. I suppose they set it there to accommodate the doctor’s subplot, but that’s never really interesting or engaging, despite the actor’s very good performance.

And yeah, let me talk about the color pallette — I know every movie in a war-torn European time has to be drained of color and energy, but holy fuck man, this shit is ugly as fuck to look at. There’s a middle-ground between Argento’s blaring neon lights and making every frame an ugly colorless army green. The colors in the 1977 original are pretty much THE defining characteristic of that movie. It’s one of those movies where so many shots look like paintings — it’s so colorful and interesting to look at. I really loved that about it. Guadagnino’s version of Suspiria is, at times, overwhelmingly ugly. An art nerd out there might be thinking, “Guadagnino OBVIOUSLY wants to contrast the beauty of dance with the ugliness of social context” or some other stupid shit and sure, I suppose that’s possible, but the effect ends up being that this movie is just fucking ugly (for whatever reason).

ALL THAT SAID, I pretty much enjoyed them at about the same level despite their differences. The shortcomings of the original are made up for ten fold in the, uhh, HOMAGE, and vice versa. There’s still a definitive Suspiria to be made — one that isn’t butt ugly and one that has a decent plot — but this ain’t it.