More bewildering than bewitching

Suspiria (18) Verdict: Arresting but overlong ★★★✩✩

ITALIAN director Luca Guadagnino doesn’t do humdrum. His 2015 film A Bigger Splash was both an erotic thriller and an uproarious black comedy; I loved it. His next, Call Me By Your Name (2017), was a powerful coming-of-age tale about a gay relationship.

I thought it over-praised, but could see why it was nominated for four Oscars, winning one.

Now, he has remade Suspiria, in homage to a weird 1977 horror film, by his compatriot Dario Argento, that had a profound impact on him as a child.

Alas, he allows his reverence to get the better of him. The original lasted a little over 90 minutes. This drags on even more weirdly for almost an hour longer, becoming as much an endurance test as a piece of entertainment.

Still, it is certainly full of arresting images, as you might expect of a story that over-ambitiously mixes dance, witchcraft, psychiatry, the Holocaust and the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Tilda Swinton plays more than one role and is on creepily mesmerising form throughout, notably as a celebrated choreographer who also happens to be part of a coven of malevolent witches. But Dakota Johnson, who also starred with Swinton in A Bigger Splash and has mercifully now slipped the handcuffs of the ghastly Fifty Shades trilogy, is similarly fine.

She plays Susie, a young dancer from a religious community in rural Ohio, who arrives in Berlin in 1977 to join a famous all-female company led by the fierce Madame Blanc (Swinton).

Gradually, as the witches try to recruit her, Susie is sucked into a gory, supernatural nightmare that yields one or two truly extraordinary scenes, but don’t bother unless you can conjure up some serious staying power.