It's an odd thing to be excited to see a remake, particularly when the excitement is coming from me and the remake is a beloved classic I hold dear to my heart. Or something like that. But why mess with perfection just to use an existing name? Particularly when the original isn't a mainstream horror icon in the usual sense. Dario Argento and John Carpenter might go hand in hand in the dark corners of the world of horror cinema fans but there's a reason only one of them suffers frequent remakes. Still, the buzz was strangely positive and the details, while seeming very familiar, were being mixed with fresh ideas. At least on the outside. Under the surface things are far less interesting.
Suspiria (1977) was, and is, an assault on the senses. A blood pumping barrage of colour and noise that mixes fleeting fairy tale plot elements with otherworldly visuals. It's more of a fever dream than an actual story in parts, a lurid primary coloured nightmare. But it was never concerned with the narrative in a way that felt important. In the year of Star Wars and Sorcerer it still feels just as exciting as its contemporaries. The remake on the other had is twice as long and half as colourful, in an apparent attempt to avoid comparison to the source material. Instead of an ethereal experience this version is for lack of a better term, diluted.
For some reason a whole lot of extra stuff has been crammed into the running time. Various character names remain as Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives at a ballet school run by Madam Blanc (Tilda Swinton) and discovers that the place is a front for a coven of witches. And while there's a lot of extra detail exploring the nature of this group and their methods just about every other aspect of the story is brimming with superfluous information. The result is a story firmly set in a real version of 1977 that shows the Berlin Wall, the mood in Cold War West Germany, and the activity of Palestinian plane hijackers. Does this feed into the nature of a story by adding layers cultural guilt and civil unrest to the proceedings? Maybe.
Does it add to the film? Not really. Even the few throwaway elements of exposition in the original film in which Udo Keir and Rudolf Schündler had cameos as psychology experts have been stretched out to new extremes. Now the film spends excessive amounts of time with a psychotherapist who often seems like the main character of an entirely different film. It might have been interesting to see this angle play out but the result is a strange and lethargic exercise that goes off on tangents about the Holocaust instead of developing the plot at hand. If anything it just serves to diminish atmosphere in which the vulnerable students were left to fend for themselves and figure it all out alone.
Visually there are some interesting choices in terms of production design and camera work, but it's all very desaturated and washed out looking for the most part. Just as the story has been spread across a much wider canvass, the colours have been drastically thinned out. It's strangely reminiscent of Possession (1981) with a similarly bleak Cold War mood but it lacks any of the eerie atmosphere needd. If anything this is far too visually similar to the big screen version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) which was sometimes as laborious in places. But that adaptation was rooted in its period for a reason and at least had a lot of effective tension building during all the detective work.
There are at least a few interesting moments of genuine dread sprinkled throughout, particularly during the big shock sequences. The witches have a few nasty new tricks up the sleeves and there's certainly an imaginatively gruesome flair at work during these moments. If only there was more of them. The finale on the other hand feels like something straight from a cheap Japanese B-movie without the absurd tone or the dark humour. The handful of nightmare sequences are interesting and build towards this story's new plot developments, but it's just too bloated and meandering to be engaging. If these were just part of a trashy 90-minute effort I might be on board, but the rest is so drab and tedious.
The music from Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke adds a bit of spooky melancholy to the proceedings but it's never enough to lend it any character beyond the first big witchcraft set piece. Even the usually reliable Tilda Swinton seems to have had all her charisma sapped away, and she spends most of the film looking vaguely perturbed about an internal power struggle. It's an interesting take on the material to actually put in some real dance school performances and explore all of this in new ways, but at the end of the day it's so incredibly slow and self indulgent that all the merits of this approach are neutered. Just like some of the evil cult's victims the whole thing left me feeling grey and withered.
2/5
BONUS REVIEW
HALLOWEEN (2018)
Is this another remake? Well yes and no. Well mostly yes, but at the same time it's trying to be clever about it... while still being another soft reboot. Things didn't use to be this complex, particular when it came to John Carpenter's original 1978 chiller. It was all gliding camera work and spooky keyboard sounds, with barely a drop of blood in sight. Was the killer evil? Maybe. Was he spurred on by his own sinister motives or something more supernatural? It really didn't matter. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) just happened to be delivering spare keys to his old family home that day and her friends got slaughtered as a result of bad luck.
Jump forward four decades and the film makers have decided that Michael Myers is a truly random killing machine without even the most simple stalker motivation. Here he escapes the asylum once again and stabs his way through the suburbs of Haddonfield with a lot more violence than ever before. In some cases the deaths are pretty ridiculous and push it all right back into silly slasher territory. Which is odd when they're clearly copying the original film for many of the shots. I guess they forgot to homage the actual suspense, even when Carpenter is back on board. At least his new score is pretty nice I guess.
Elsewhere the film is just kind of dumb as a pair of English podcast hosts (because podcasts are a thing I guess?) discover that Laurie has become a survival obsessed shut in. If this story cuts out Halloween II and any other sequels it's not clear why she's become like this, but they obviously wanted a lot of cool gun firing scenes and a house full of panic room tricks. There's an attempt to make this all about dealing with grief and parenting, but ultimately these ideas come off as strangely unearned. Michael might be loved by the audience but is he really a big deal to the characters themselves at this point? It's hard to say. It's mostly entertaining, but it's also full of semi-formed ideas like this and the results are just kind of forgettable.
3/5
