CW: contains references to strong violence. Also contains spoilers for the film Suspiria (2018) and, for all I know, Suspiria (1977).
I can pinpoint the exact moment where Suspiria (2018) lost me. Over halfway through the film, Sara (Mia Goth), a student at the Markos Dance Academy, is becoming suspicious of the matrons who run the school and, at the suggestion of Dr. Klemperer (‘Lutz Ebersdorf’), searches the building for hidden rooms. Behind the mirrored surfaces of a rehearsal room, she discovers a passage to the literal witches’ lair: a dark room of cabinets containing esoteric and occult instruments and statuary. This room is full of beautiful imagery — darkly sexual sculptures, ceremonial hooks, evidence of a long history of witches and black magic — but, in terms of narrative, the discovery of a secret room conveniently filled with evidence of the actual nature of the dance company feels too convenient. The scene encapsulates the dueling tendencies in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake: on one hand, the film leans on its imagery and its’ nightmarish evocation of metaphor and on the other hand it wants to explain everything in clear, non-metaphorical terms.
Suspiria succeeds when its leaning on its beautiful, surrealist imagery. The film has incredible cinematography from Sayombhu Mukdeeprom making it feel like a horror film from the 1970s. The camera movements and the colour palette wonderfully evoke films like The Omen (1976) and The Exorcist (1973). As the film opens, the cinematography emphasizes the Brutalist atmosphere of 1970s Berlin in a way that feels beautifully oppressive. When Susie (Dakota Johnson) first enters the Academy, Mukdeeprom’s camera treats the building like the camera treats the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980): the building itself is given presence and weight in a way that oozes threat. Independent of the people in it, we feel that the building is a dark and evil place. The sound design and Thom Yorke’s haunting soundtrack also — apart from a few jarring oh-we’re-listening-to-Radiohead-now moments — builds the haunting imagery of the film’s early acts.
This imagery furthers the narrative most successfully in a scene where Susie, having just been accepted into the Academy, volunteers to replace a dancer and perform the lead in the group’s most famous piece. As she dances, as her body twists and snaps to the music, we see the dancer that she replaced, Olga (Elena Fokina), twisting and snapping in an act of sympathetic magic. Susie’s control over her body is contrasted with the lack of control of Olga’s body as it bends and contorts into grotesque positions that break her body and her mind. There are no words: the scene perfectly marries the images on screen, the backing of the soundtrack, and the cracks of Olga’s broken body. Without any words, we see feminine power and feminine violence.
But for all its wonderful cinematography and sound design, Suspiria isn’t confident enough to rely on its imagery. As soon as Sara starts investigating the mysteries of the Academy and realising the existence of the coven, the film starts to favour telling over showing. In one particular exposition-dump of a scene, Dr. Klemperer outlines to Sara the structure of the Three Mothers, the power struggle within the coven between Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) and Madame Markos (also Tilda Swinton), and starts throwing around the word ‘witch’. In the first few acts, witchcraft is evoked through the dark, surrealist imagery of Susie’s dreams and the haunting way that the Academy is shot. Almost as soon as the word ‘witch’ is actually uttered, this power is lost as the light of explanation clears away the beautiful fog of the nightmare. The film is suddenly not about feminine power: it’s about actual literal witches.
Contrast this with The VVitch (2015) which earns its discussion of witches through the religious context of the time period and through the perspective of the film largely being through the eyes of children. Witches and witchcraft are part of the cultural subconscious of the characters in The VVitch in a way that they aren’t in characters in 1970s Berlin. The imagery of Suspiria earns a suspicion of female power and an evocation of dark forces: it does not earn a sudden shift into literal sacrificial rituals, blood magic, and witchcraft.
The lack of commitment to imagery is driven home in one of the final scenes. The few remaining women in the Academy are being told that Madame Blanc has left the company when there’s a brief cut to matrons cleaning up the bloodbath of the sacrificial chamber following the devastating final encounter with Death herself. The possible metaphor of the blood sacrifice is suddenly grounded in a reality that it absolutely needn’t be grounded in. Dream, hallucination, and metaphor is abandoned in favour of showing the reality of cleaning up a marble chamber covered in blood with mops and buckets.
This tendency of the film to ask us to interpret its images literally is most damaging for the film’s feminist subtext. The film is ostensibly about feminine power. The political context of Berlin in 1977 and the terrorist actions surrounding the Baader-Meinhof Group contrasts the masculine violence of the German Autumn — the kind of violence that attracts national news and forms societal context — against the feminine violence of witchcraft and the dance — a violence content to remain invisible.
But as the film invites us to treat this as literal, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a misogynistic treatment of feminine power. Taken literally rather than metaphorically, it’s a male-gaze-y view of how women treat power, rooted in the misogynistic mythos of witchcraft, blood magic, and dark female rituals. Rather than supporting feminine power, this traditional view of women and the lack of agency of many of the characters instead evokes the patriarchal fear of the feminine: fear of feminized arts like dance, fear of menstruation, fear of matriarchies. If, as the film suggests, we’re not to interpret it as a dream / nightmare or a metaphor, then the climatic scene underneath the Academy is literally a confrontation between the male-defined archetypes of women: the virgin in Susie, the mother in Madame Blanc, and the crone in Madame Markos. The prominence of a work by Carl Jung in the first scene in Dr. Klemperer’s office tells us that we’re very firmly in the male-dominated world of Freudian / Jungian psychoanalysis and the film never manages to successfully shift out of this patriarchal register.
