Thoughts on Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria”
On an aesthetic level, Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria barely resembles the 1977 cult-classic — in this sense, and only this sense, is it a failure. The original, a neon-tinged film from Italian director Darrio Argento, is seemingly referenced in plot only. The film follows "Susie Banion" — portrayed by Dakota Johnson — an Ohioan Mennonite who has traveled to Berlin to join the (in-universe) "world-famous" Markos Dance Company. As the story unfolds, Susie comes to learn that the aforementioned dance troupe simply serves as a convenient cover for a coven of witches who practice a form of ritualistic, dance-based kinetic magic. This is where the apparent similarities with Argento's original end. In Guadagnino's version, the story is set in the political Germany of Argento's time: Berlin in the cold autumn of 1977; divided between east and west; communistic and capitalistic; caught between the burgeoning of a new ideology and the decay of another.
Where Argento and Guadagnino's imaginations overlap seem to be squarely positioned in only the plot's most necessary themes: those of motherhood, those of female autonomy, and those of paranoia. Where these themes are explored superficially in Argento's 1977 Suspiria, largely byproducts from interpretations of the film's setting and characterizations, Guadagnino intends to explore the implications of these themes within the diegetic universe of Suspiria as well as the sociological framework that led to the original's creation.
From its first moments, Suspiria (2018) separates itself from its 1977 counterpart — the title card reads "six acts and an epilogue set in divided Berlin," signaling a patient, almost classical structure that contrasts with the original's blood-soaked looseness. Where Argento's relied on bombast and excess to entertain its audience, Guadagnino's is wholly minimalist: autumn-ish brown-tones and diegetic sounds fill a sparse opening scene, set in a therapist's office, with the first needle-drop coming nearly five minutes into an already ambitious 152-minute runtime. In a similar vein, the first act of Suspiria (2018) is defined almost entirely by a willful lack of momentum; long strolls through empty hallways, dancing to the sounds of silence, and obsessively well-timed blocking, which all lend to an overwhelming and surreal feeling of paranoia.
The filmmaking techniques employed mirror the mise-en-scene’s minimalist tone: actors take their time, cameras linger, and cuts land slightly early or a little too late, depending on the intended impact. Montages are frequently intercut between acts, which highlight the between-the-lines narrative arcs. A scene about a third of the way through the film, following Olga Ivanova’s exit (portrayed by first-time actor Elena Fokina), best showcases both the differences between the original and Guadagnino’s directorial strengths.
The camera lingers on wides of extras, blocked millimeter-perfect around the room, as Susie and Madam Blanc have their first meaningful interaction. Meanwhile, fast cuts and claustrophobically close shots of Olga’s exit through the labyrinthine building are intercut with the comparative calm of the previous scene — a juxtaposition which attacks “tension” as a mood from both ends of its function. This AB pacing continues as follows: Madame Blanc asks Susie to dance by herself, while Olga’s path has been charmed by the witches to lead her to a mirrored dance room. The two distinct moods meet as Susie’s dancing begins to remotely torture Olga’s body. The “lingering device,” as it were, is flipped and transposed on Olga’s body, with Susie’s scenes now defined by claustrophobic close-ups and Olga’s by their wides, forcing the audience to interrogate the violence inherent to this coven’s goals.
Guadagnino has stripped Suspiria from all its connective tissue to its barest parts — crafting a sort of body-without-organs, allowing Guadagnino to explore the metatextual implications of the original: the philosophy that inspired its story and the society which necessitated its telling. Guadagnino's version is in constant conversation with Argento's, despite the intentional efforts to separate itself from the original. It is, to put it in the terms of Markos' company leader Madame Blanc (portrayed by Tilda Swinton) "dancing the dance of another" and "recreating itself in [the original's] image."
Following the previous assertion, the fact that Suspiria is a remake lends directly to its themes: Suspiria (2018) is not simply re-aestheticizing the story to match the tastes of a contemporary audience as an extension of some faceless trust — it is, from a structural lens, an exploration of motherhood and what it means to emerge from the silhouette of another. This point is all but literalized by Swinton's Madame Blanc halfway through the film, imparting advice to a struggling Susie: "When you dance the dance of another, you recreate yourself in its image. You empty yourself so her work can live within you." This is the moment where the film's core question, and its raison d'être, are laid bare: what does it mean to dance the dance of another, and by extension, what dances are we unwitting participants in? By interrogating this question, dissecting it over the course of two and a half hours, the audience is invited to deconstruct the political ramifications as well — if the foundations of a society are corrupted, like those of Suspiria's divided Berlin, is it in our best interest to resume that same dance?
Almost exactly halfway through the film, following a moment where Susie criticizes Madame Blanc's methods, Madame Blanc explores the previously stated idea under a new social lens: "… I don't know how aware you are of what times we lived through here 40 years ago, out of which this piece was made, every arrow [which] flies feels the pull of the earth..." Every story that is told feels the weight of the tales that came before it, that inspired it, like a specter or ghost haunting both writer and audience. By taking the original and surgically trimming it down to its skeleton, Guadagnino is able to explore the mechanisms that led to the original’s story and study its organs from a slightly defocused view. The theme of motherhood is thus transformed into a conversation about sociogenetic inheritance, or what elements of learned “dances” are passed on to future generations.
In its final scenes, before the epilogue, Guadagnino explores motherhood from the perspective of Jacques Lacan, a philosopher name dropped earlier in the film. Lacan’s psychoanalytic lens was a development over Sigmund Freud, narrowing down some of his abstractions: here, Guadagnino borrows Lacan’s concept of the tripartite mother and its relationship to the development of a “self.” His perspective serves as the final extension of the theme of motherhood in *Suspiria*, split up into Lacan’s three parts: the first is the death of the false leader *Madame Markos* (another of the three characters portrayed by Tilda Swinton), or the death of the “imaginary mother.” The second is the murder of Madame Blanc, who introduces Susie to the coven (and the catalyst to her eventual becoming), marking the death of the “symbolic mother.” The third is *Susie’s* metaphorical death, as she emerges and presents herself as the “real mother,” a temporal avatar of the film’s titular *Mother Suspiriorum.*
It is here that Guadagnino’s deconstruction of motherhood reaches its climax: only in the death of the imagined, symbolic, and real is Susie’s rebirth as a new being possible. Put another way, in applying that idea to the film as a whole, Guadagnino has crafted something completely unique, with the original lying extant in its own reflection. By adopting the original’s themes, and avoiding the original’s aesthetics, Guadagnino offers a fresh perspective on not just Argento’s *Suspiria,* but what it means to *remake*: what it means to dive into a body manufactured by another author; what it means to claim it as your own; what it means to endeavor in that process. What it means to “recreate yourself” in the “dance of another.”