'Suspiria' A Review

Suspiria is pedantic attempt at a genre picture, a remake of the 1977 cult classic. The movie opens on a Mennonite home where a woman lies dying. Cut to the frantic rain-soaked Patricia(Chloë Grace Moretz) running through the streets of 1977 Berlin to her psychologist Josef Klemperer(Tilda Swinton) to rave about the dance company of which she is a member that is run by witches. Cut to Susie(Dakota Johnson), presumably the daughter of the previously pictured dying Mennonite woman, who has come to Berlin to audition for said dance company run by Martha Graham surrogate Madame Blanc(Tilda Swinton). After a startling audition she is accepted.

Swinton, as is no surprise as she is one of our greatest living actors, is competent and compelling in both roles. She grounds the heightened and more operatic element with a realism and emotion which the story desperately needs. Unfortunately no one else in the entire ensemble takes the same approach. Their styles are a shotgun blast from bizarrely restrained minimalism to cacophonastic scenery-chewing incomprehensibility. I don't fault the actors themselves(except one) because its clear they received absolutely no direction when it came to actual performance. Moretz, typically good to great and never below charming(see The 5th Wave), puts in categorically the worst performance of her career- unhinged not as a character but as a clearly floundering and cringe-inducing actor saying lines that are ludicrous and devoid of any actual meaning. The one glaring black hole in the ensemble as far as talent is Dakota Johnson who basically replicates her Anastasia Steele role in Susie, which exceedingly peculiar given this is a completely different movie and a different character with a starkly different tone. Her portrayal is tissue-paper thin, she telegraphs naive so hard it comes across as vapid, you would expect such a clearly vacant performance on a middle school stage rather than a wide release motion picture. Unfortunately the supporting cast is filled out with interesting actors, dancers, and models who aren't given a chance to do much of anything and are constantly cut out and around in favor of the yawn-inducing Johnson.

There are a few visual flourishes most notably the evocative dream sequences. The dance pieces would be incredibly effective and elevate the movie if they weren't edited so frenetically. The camera is never aloud to sit still long enough to actually see the dance. There are so many cuts and flourishes and close ups all the meticulous(and truly impressive) choreography is almost totally wasted.

As to the themes, there are none, or maybe there are so many and they are all so lazily developed(read not at all) that it comes to the same thing. The Holocaust, the Lufthansa Flight 181 hijacking, purity, feminism, paganism etc. etc. are brought up but not explored or developed. It's as if the mere mention or implication of them paired with a disconnected albeit heightened style is suppose to suffice in place of an actual point of view or something new or of value to say.

No surprise the movie is pretentious, negligent, boring, and provides (the barest trace of) style over substance as it was directed by Luca Guadagnino perpetrator of Call Me By Your Name.

Worst of the year contender.

Don't See It.