Stylish and chilling dance of death
The Italian feminist movement of the Seventies had a chant that would reliably spread through any protest like fire through scrub: “tremate, tremate, le streghe son
tornate.” In English: tremble, tremble, the witches have returned.
This astonishing new film from Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call
Me By Your Name and A Bigger Splash, is a remake of one of the definitive witch pictures: Dario Argento’s
Suspiria, released in 1977, about a German dance company with a covenous secret. Working with screenwriter David Kajganich, Guadagnino has stripped down the original to its springs and reupholstered it into something utterly distinct from – and I believe superior to – Argento’s visually iconic (but slightly precarious) original. This new Suspiria takes place in post-war Berlin, a split city, and summons up the spirit of that old marching motto: the supposed order of things is a recent invention and ripe for the reshuffling, and a group of independently minded women are just the existential threat it deserves.
But none of this is on the mind of Susie Bannion (a never-better Dakota Johnson), a young American who arrives in the city in the middle of the so-called German Autumn of 1977, with the terrorist campaign of the Baader-meinhof Gang dominating the nightly news. Susie is there to interview for a position at Markos Tanzgruppen – a prestigious dance troupe based in a glowering Bauhaus megalith tucked behind concrete barricades. To dance for Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) has been a lifelong dream of Susie’s, even though – or perhaps especially because – she grew up in a stringent Amish household. And a position in the company has opened up – and Susie, whose carnal, writhing steps you can hardly believe come from this prim Amish doll, is a perfect fit.
But there is a mystery surrounding the group – one being investigated by the psychoanalyst Dr Jozef Klemperer (Swinton in terrifically plausible prosthetics), who has the diaries of a former dancer that describe sinister, occult activities afoot. As Susie quickly becomes Madame Blanc’s favourite, another dancer, Sara (Mia Goth, superb) grows uneasy, and makes contact with Klemperer. Surely the rituals can’t actually be magical, Sara asks. “You can give someone your delusion,” Klemperer replies. “That is religion. That was the Reich.”
From this juicy historical backdrop, Suspiria draws a complex, provocative line through faith, politics, dance and, yes, witchcraft: in all cases, a group of resolute like minds can birth something more powerful and dangerous than themselves. The sense that the dance school is sequestered away like a cell becomes oppressively intense, thanks to the extraordinary sets and sound design, a laser-accurate feel for the stern graphic design of the period, and the work of ace Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who flits between arthouse abstraction and grindhouse pans and zooms. The finishing touch is the Thom Yorke soundtrack, which sounds like someone crying at the bottom of a well: ideal. And the last of its six acts goes for broke in a way rarely seen since the heyday of David Cronenberg. RC To be released in UK cinemas on Nov 16