Review of Suspiria (2018) by Hnestlyonthesly — 12 Oct 2019

Suspiria is half dancing, half German terror cell story in “six acts and an epilogue” and 90% of it was okay, but the ending burned all the good will that it had built up for the first 100 minutes.

Apparently this is the same director who had worked with Tilda on A Bigger Splash, which for me means that this guy is more often than not pretty good at what he does. I went in knowing that his last project was Call Me By Your Name. In a few ways, I thought this was a good companion film to that one. Call Me By Your Name is almost exclusively a study in the eroticism of the male body and the idyllic Italian countryside. Suspiria deals mainly with the female body and the grim, gloomy streets of winter in Berlin. Where CMBYN was frivolous and leisurely, Suspiria is tense and gruesome. Sex and sexual appetite in Suspiria is dangerous, ominous–a monster lurks beneath the studio floor waiting to consume her prey. Outside of the contrast with previous work, I’m less sure of how to think about the aesthetics of the film.

Probably the most disappointing thing about this film for me, which is a spoiler, was the lack of resolution of Tilda Swinton playing a second character without it ever being addressed. The second character took up such a big portion of the film and his arc is fairly minor, almost as minor as Chloe Grace-Moretz’s cameo (whoever put her name on the posters for this movie ought to be sued for misleading advertising). I don’t think I understood the gimmick or the game being played. If it was truly supposed to be a secret, I don’t get how the director and Tilda thought they would get away with it. I’ve been reading about how she’s playing two characters basically as soon as the first theatrical trailer for this film came out.

Anyway, I’d say this is probably only a film for you if you enjoyed the original and want to see a new take on the story, or if you have been really thirsting for an art house flick about hive mind ballet with fifteen minutes of **** crazy slasher movie at the end in the same vein as Mother!.