SUSPIRIA Review

Cultsploitation co-editor Michael wrote a review about Suspiria a couple days ago (Umbrella Entertainment Blu-Ray) and he did an excellent job pinpointing the beauty, pathos, and surrealism of Dario Argento's film. However, people do tend to view films differently the more they've seen them, and rather than run down a straight review of the merits of this classic - which seems both redundant and unnecessary considering the amount of good film criticism already out there about the movie and having already reviewed it myself a number of times - I wanted to take a look at the things I found myself appreciating more during this 4k watch of Argento's supernatural witch worship.

The first thing I noticed with this clean and gorgeous transfer was the camerawork, and I'm not just talking about Luciano Tovoli's expert use of colors. Suspiria is meant to mess with the viewer's perceptions just as its main character Suzy begins to lose her sense of reality while at the Tanz Institute, and Tovoli helps the audience get sucked into the proceedings by using off-kilter camera angles and, more profoundly, distorted lenses. As the camera pans around rooms, one can notice the distortion at the edges of the screen, morphing our point of view and adding a sense of unease. One of the most notable elements is during Suzy's exploration of the room with the blue iris; the camera follows her, and the distortion makes the room feel much larger than it is. It's almost a visual representation of H.P. Lovecraft's otherworldly dimensions, the feeling that the angles are just not quite right.

The other new element that stuck out to me is Suspiria's refusal to lock down a typical film structure. In some ways, Argento and Daria Nicolodi's script goes through the motions - meet main character, main character notices something strange, eventually main character solves the problem - but in reality Suspiria often foregoes the normal flow of its story for something more organic. In this case, Suzy is often relegated to the background of the plot: things happen to her, but for two-thirds of the film, Stefania Casini's character Sara leads the investigation, doing all of the work to figure out that the school's teachers are not leaving the school.

It leaves Suzy in a fairy tale state - quite often drugged in a Sleeping Beauty-esque way - until the film's conclusion, which actually feels somewhat rushed considering the languid pace of the rest of the film. Then, she's a witchhunter, a fighter, and Argento emphasizes her wits and power in the final climax. But Suspiria, despite all of the potential for thematic resonance with the color scheme and fairy tale scenarios, is somewhat theme-less - intentionally so. Argento and Nicolodi layer all of these strange elements together but they leave the connections disparate, forcing the viewer to put them together. In other films, that might be deemed something like laziness or incompleteness; but Suspiria feels different, as though its artistic endeavors are meant to be frustratingly out of reach. Its most explicit themes deal with power and money, and perhaps the consequences of the pursuit of both those things. The other thematic elements, though, are left up to the viewer to decide and/or decode.

Suspiria has a lot of richness, and though there will ultimately be some viewers - both contemporary and experienced - who don't appreciate the abrupt and fragmented nature of the story, those that simply ride through the film - from the awkward dialogue to the loud, bombastic Goblin soundtrack - will find a lot to enjoy and decipher. Without a doubt the film's color has become Suspiria's most defining characteristic, but hidden within those hues is a puzzle that continues to impress new and old viewers.