dani’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Death to any other Mother."
You will never guess for what purpose the hooks are used in the newest Luca Guadagnino's masterpiece! And the fact that you would never guess perfectly sums up the entire film, it's completely unpredictable and multilayered labyrinth in which you can easily get lost, but one thing that Suspiria (2018) will not let to happen is for you to leave the theater unemotional. Who would have thought that the director of the last year's Call Me By Your Name will direct the most polarizing film since Aronofsky's mother! but here we are. Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria is a gross, visceral and ambitious tour into the world of witches and ballet, and it's even better than it sounds!
Luca Guadagnino didn't exactly remake Dario Argento's classic horror film but gave birth to its deranged sister. Argento's film is a cute girl next door who goes to church on Sunday and listens to The Beach Boys while Guadagnino's creation is a punk girl who beats the shit out of "wankers" on Friday and blows up supermarkets on Sunday while listening to The Exploited and Dead Kennedys. I was very curious about what the new Suspiria is going to be about because Luca Guadagnino is just unable to make a straightforward horror film a la The Conjuring or Halloween, and what I got is neither what I expected nor wanted it to be, but nonetheless this has taken over entirely my body and soul.
Suspiria (2018) is a rich film that offers a lot and perhaps too much for certain people but for me it's a joy to go through each scene looking for connections and exploring endless themes and metaphors, solving this beautifully created puzzle. At some point this film is like a dance, it's a chaos powered by pure emotions, sound design, editing and cinematography are exceptionally unique. They don't follow rules of filmmaking and simply do what seems to be the best fpr for the scene, it's almost like they're recreating cinema. And obviously I can't not mention Thom Yorke who composed a score of such greatness that it could only be compared to the scores of the best film composer of the 21st century (it's Jonny Greenwood of you didn't know). It's kind of a score that's not just accompanying but is one of the most important parts of the story like production design or cinematography. Yorke's music totally reflects the story and the characters, and more precisely nature and body horror of Susie, transformation of her body from a shy and extremely talented American girl from Ohio into [redacted] and [redacted] [redacted].
Each of the performances is spectacular and daring to almost impossible extent. (The things that happened to the Russian dancer was done without any cgi so...) Dakota Johnson is as many things as the number of characters Tilda Swinton plays and even more, she's shy, scared, paranoid, powerful and dominant, and she does all of that just perfectly, let alone her dance, it seems like there's nothing in this world she cannot do.
Suspiria (2018) touches many themes, feminism, gender, fascism, guilt and shame to name a few, but I think the main themes are abuse of power and power of of a woman's body. The first one is portrayed on the witches who used their power for the wrong cause so abused it (I won't continue speaking about this theme because I will spoil a lot and you really don't want to know anything about the film before actually seeing it). The second one is my personal favorite and it's power of woman's body. This film isn't only a body horror in a common sense of this term, it's a film that studies bodies, Mr. Guadagnino and the cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom study a woman's body (and some fluids that come out of bodies) from hair to feet. This film sees a female body as the most powerful and complex mechanism in the world. Not by a mere coincidence the only male character (who played by an actual man) is humiliated by the witches for simplicity of his body (kinda funny moment to be honest, or I just love when men are being humiliated). A woman's body is at the highest point of its abilities during dance, as Susie remarks in one of the scenes it feels like having sex (not with a man though lmao) which only highlights all the sexual themes of the film even more.
Luca Guadagnino's disturbing, haunting and metaphorical opus crawls under your skin like it you or not. It's an ambiguous work with lots of memorable scene that will stay with you for the rest of your life, or even traumatize you by its grotesque and nightmarish imagery. Suspiria feels familiar and retro but at the same time completely new, like something that's never been done before, it's a film that requires multiple viewings to unlock all the hidden doors of this masterfully made labyrinth.
