Suspiria review: Indulgent horror piffle that will have you snoring in your seat

Charlotte O'Sullivan16 November 2018

A remake of Dario Argento’s lusciously lurid giallo, starring an omnipresent Tilda Swinton (she plays three characters) and featuring a score by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

The costumes are exquisitely sly. Ditto the sets, choreography and cinematography. I implore you to watch the trailer. Director Luca Guadagnino (the genius behind Call Me By Your Name) knows exactly what he’s doing. For 92 seconds.

Late Seventies, West Berlin. As radical Left-wing groups fight The Man, tempers flare in an all-female dance academy. Severe, charismatic and almost certainly in the closet, Madame Blanc (Swinton) is vying for power with mysterious Madame Markos (Swinton again, in a fat suit that would make Lucian Freud drool).

Dance student Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz) is convinced all the women are witches and shares her suspicions with elderly therapist Josef Klemperer (played by guess who?). Meanwhile, Ohio native Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), raised as a Mennonite, finds herself embraced by the academy, even as Patricia’s friend, Sara (Mia Goth), and Klemperer begin to view it as a site of evil.

Any witch way: Mia Goth as Sara and Dakota Johnson as Susie star in Suspiria

Susie looks awesomely strange. Imagine the love child of Julie Burchill and a Saturday Night Live Conehead. She also has a little-girl voice and a habit of dropping bestiality into the conversation. Flashbacks show Susie being punished for masturbating by her puritanical mum (Malgorzata Bela). Thanks to Johnson’s vibrantly blank face, all the pieces add up.

However, Susie’s adventures in Berlin are neither scary nor involving. A typically over-extended set-piece shows our heroine dancing up a storm, while another student, Olga, gets metaphorically blown away. We have no emotional investment in Olga, who takes forever to die. Scream. Scrunch. Snore.

In fact, none of the supporting players is able to make an impression, because writer David Kajganich (responsible for tedious crime thriller True Story) is too busy drawing links between factionalism, separatism, the repression of homosexuality, phallophobia, misogyny and — ta-da! — generational guilt and the Holocaust. Kajganich is a purveyor of pretentious piffle. Robert Eggers’ The Witch tracked the (re)birth of a female pariah with far more intelligence. Hell, even The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina digs deeper than Suspiria.

By the by, I used to work in the same office as former Baader-Meinhof member Astrid Proll, who gave off a similar vibe to one of Suspiria’s bit-players, Miss Griffith. The latter is brilliantly portrayed by Sylvie Testud as a mousey type with an insomniac’s wild stare.

This desperate woman is tantalising. What a spell Guadagnino could have cast if he’d been less indulgent with himself and, crucially, hired a scriptwriter with more insight into what witches want.

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