I'd never been very excited about watching this because I'd marked it down as a Hey Nonny Nonny–style Shakespeare adaptation, if you know what I mean, which I generally bounce off. But that was stupid because the only thing that really matters in any Shakespeare production in any medium is making the characters come alive, especially in those of the plays (which lbh is most of them) which have awkward plot contrivances.
And in those terms – despite ramping up…
A few interesting adaptation decisions, most notably extrapolating one line from Lady M into a backstory about a dead child, but by and large the high-budget-80s-advert aesthetic and trailer-frantic editing doesn't compensate for the actors getting bogged down doing Duane Benzie voice at each other.
This hasn’t dissuaded me from my opinion that Penny Woolcock is one of the UK’s most interesting directors (one of our few interesting directors) but, as with everything else of hers I’ve seen, it was too flawed to get my wholehearted approbation. The idea of an opposition between safe domesticity and living for the moment strikes me as similar to the opposition between heart and mind – it’s obviously in some sense useful (or at least appealing), because it gets…
So what seems to have happened here is that Luca Guadagnino saw Argento's Suspiria and thought – not unreasonably – "Man, a school of witches in Germany in the 70s, what a potent premise, how could Argento leave all that on the table and just make a stylish suspense movie about nothing?"
Then he got out a flipchart and some markers, and brainstormed every idea he could think of that you could spin off from that premise. World War II! Baader-Meinhof!…
