Suspiria
With the pending release of a remake of Dario Argento’s beloved horror epic, I felt it was time for me to revisit the film myself, which I saw many years ago, and wasn’t a fan. That hasn’t stopped the theme by Goblin from being a horror score staple in my listening rotation every October. Time often has a way of changing the way we think of movies that don’t always connect with us when we’re younger- surely Argento’s feverish thriller would be the same way?
Jessica Harper stars as Suzy Bannion, an American ballet student who is coming to a prestigious German dance school to study. However, she is immediately greeted with bizarre occurrences when, on the rainy night she comes to the school, a young woman is running out of the building, and ends up dead shortly after. She stays somewhere else that night, but when Suzy returns the next morning, the strangeness of the night before carries over, and her first few days at the school are filled with dreadful happenings, and a strict secrecy that makes Suzy suspicious of what she has gotten into.
A non-anamorphic widescreen DVD was not the ideal way to rewatch “Suspiria,” not just because so much of my UHD TV screen was wasted, but because there was no way it could do the hallucinatory images Argento and his cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, created through color and expansive shot composition. (Why, Netflix DVD, did I have to receive this copy when I’m sure better- read: anamorphic- versions were available?) That being said, Argento’s world drew me in from the moments we see Harper’s Suzy at the airport in Germany to the rain-drenched first night outside the school. Even during the day, the Academy- a lush production design by Giuseppe Bassan- has something unsettling about it that Argento’s sometimes bold color scheme, and Goblin’s powerful musical riffs, merely enhances. This is a film not based around characters and story but a vision and feeling. This is not to say there are not interesting characters (Alida Valli’s Miss Tanner and Joan Bennett’s Madame Blanc keep Suzy off-balance from the start) or story beats in Argento and Daria Nicolodi’s screenplay (inspired by an 1845 essay called Sighs from the Depths), but Argento’s thriller is more notable for visual ideas than narrative ones. All the characters are standard-issue, but the sight of maggots falling from a ceiling; a blind musician being tormented on the streets; and the ways Argento puts the female students into scenarios to meet their end, are powerful to take in, especially when Argento’s color scheme kicks in. The film feels backloaded in terms of its story, but I definitely found myself more drawn into this world more than I was when I first saw it many years ago. I’m curious to see what the remake is like.
A few hours later, and this film still has me thinking. A couple of those thoughts:
-Hans Zimmer should probably be sending some royalty checks to Goblin, since his theme for “The Ring” is quite similar. As much as I love what Zimmer and co. did in that film, though, Goblin’s score is stunning and brilliant.
-While I don’t love the film as a narrative, it was certainly engaging enough to keep me interested in Suzy’s ever-deepening dilemma at the school. It just feels more shallow than it probably should be.
