Robert Berlin’s review published on Letterboxd:
The Podcast Macabre 2021 Horror Challenge
24. Witches
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Woah this film reminds me of Suspiria (1977)! The only difference is that it is not very good and I hate my life now.
Y'know I was thinking to myself the other day that the only thing missing from Argento's 77' masterpiece was a convoluted WWII love story. And also fuck those radical colours, just replace it all with grey and lifeless reality. God this thing just felt so fucking bloated to me, and when it looks so boring that is not a good thing. Honestly, me looking at the time and realizing that I had only gone through about 30 minutes and still had 2 hours left to watch was far more scary than anything in the original so well done remake!
Now, there are actually a few scenes that made me care. There is a simultaneous dance sequence early on where one person dances around elegantly while the other flails around like a torture victim in another room, that was pretty fucked up. And then there is the scene in the weird witch basement towards the end where everything is bathed in a red light and people just fucking die. They remembered to have an artstyle for at least one scene. The primary problem is that the other 2 hours and 10 minutes or so of the runtime are well-made, but so utterly boring that it really doesn't matter in the end.
An easy way to describe why I disliked this so much is that when I watched the 1977 Suspiria it was positively impossible for me to keep my eyes off the screen. When I watched this remake however, it was nearly impossible to keep my eyes ON the screen. Many people will probably appreciate this retelling of a classic but for me it was just a bloated sleeping pill. Suspiria (2018)? More like NERDspiria (2018) imao lol! This film deserves to be pushed into a locker while the original deserves to have a smoke behind the school with all the cool kids.
