Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)/Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)

I see three canny ways to approach Argento's Suspiria. You can bask in its vertical pleasures, namely, the gorgeous set design and unmotivated lighting, by accessing a series of well-chosen screen grabs. You can listen to Goblin's classic carpet-bombing score on your playback device of choice, a sort of aural screen grab, if you will. Or you can waft in and out of it perhaps as the legit feature film at your local porn theatre, checking in between conquests and abandoning ship as Argento descends into torpor (in five, ten minutes tops). But subjecting yourself to the dreary horizontal pull of Suspiria in its entirety? Do even its legion of fans insist on the absolute necessity of such an endeavor?

The problem is a simple yet overly familiar one. There's nothing at stake in Argento's stylish set pieces. He situates them in a context so paltry that they sit there like a jewel-encrusted tchotchke. You ooh, you ahh, and then you check Wikipedia to learn if Alida Valli is still alive (nope, sadly - 2006 at 84). Each murder is akin to a drag performance wherein the queen bursts onto stage in a fabulous outfit. But then you have to suffer through a lip sync of a Celine Dion ballad after the initial surprise, shiny baubles maybe catching your eye for a fleeting moment or two. 

Take the murder of the blind pianist, Suspiria's narcoleptic nadir. It takes five minutes of screen time in a 99-minute film to dispatch with this character. And here, we don't even have the benefit of Argento's visuals to distract us, no doubt because the scene takes place outdoors where Argento cannot paint his canvas so readily. A few shadows, some nifty extreme long shots, and Goblin's score battering our ears cannot compensate for the fact that the man just stands there for the entirety of the scene. Dario, let's moooooove! Perhaps a screenplay longer than ten pages might have provided the context for this scene (and most of the others) to terrify or even intrigue us. But as the 2018 "cover version" proves, a tight narrative need not be the only tool for getting the sausage into its casing.

I infinitely prefer Guadagnino's pass at Suspiria if only for its punky refusal to indulge Argento stans. It stints on gore, moves even more glacially than the original (clocking in at over an hour longer), and looks as if it spent weeks tumbling in a cement mixer with Eastern-bloc browns and dull crimsons dominating the color scheme. And yet it conveys a palpable hyper/sleepwalking tension associated with not midnight movies but 3am movies, those quasi-psychedelic moments in which the ambient hum of the projector provides the only safeguard against a confusion of waking and dream states. I don't quite know what Guadagnino means by introducing a Mennonite past and a Baader-Meinhof present into the proceedings (something about policing women's bodies maybe?). But they offer enough context to lend the stasis some savor. You want to solve its mysteries rather than look at your phone for the tenth time. And the irony here is that it works even better than the original as a film to flit in and out of. Porous, seductive, and more than a bit preposterous, Suspiria 2018 has all the makings of my favorite genre - the film maudit. Have a hypnagogic time with it today!

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) - B-minus

Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018) - A-minus

A double feature of both at my beloved Fair Theater in Queens - A