Fans still have a long wait ahead of them before the remake of Suspiria hits theaters, but Luca Guadagnino‘s film has debuted at the Venice Film Festival and has been earning some passionate reactions.
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Remakes are commonplace in the world of horror, with some audiences immediately decrying anyone attempting to breathe life into an iconic film while other audiences know that some remakes are better than their source material, as they can take a concept and reimagine it in a much more fulfilling way.
Conceptually, most audiences have been against a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 film, though the talents of director Guadagnino, performers Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton, and a score from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke built genuine enthusiasm for the project.
With the first reviews of the film now hitting the internet, the reactions to the film have been polarizing.
Scroll down to see what critics have been saying about the remake!
The Playlist
“It certainly does play out as high-class horror-porn, and I mean that as an immense, tumescent compliment. Suspiria, (to an almost alarming thematic degree as well as everything else) is this Venice’s mother! in that it will rip the critical corpus apart from the chest out, will likely receive an F Cinemascore and will get a review here that is essentially me writhing around on its slick, gory parquet floors scrawling superlatives on the wall-mirrors in its blood and bashing myself to livid euphoric oblivion against my own distorted reflection. (I loved it, in case I’m not clear).”
The Wrap
“Who better to take on this seemingly impossible assignment than Guadagnino, coming off the impressive troika of I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name? The cinema’s greatest sensualist wasn’t going to make us smell the rosemary or taste the apricot juice this time; the idea of his gifts being applied to blood-drenched horror promised a uniquely terrifying experience. So what does Guadagnino’s version convey? Boredom, mostly, with confusion and a dollop of disappointment and irritation.
“By the time Suspiria reaches its blood-soaked, all-of-them-witches climax, I was suppressing church giggles. The frights aren’t frightening, the political subtext never connects with the rest of the movie, and even Guadagnino’s generally unfailing visual sense isn’t enough to put this over.”
Time Out
“As if sensing its own intellectual imposition, Suspiria gets gooier by the end—I preferred the creepy buildup—and these croaking, climactic scenes have the slippery weave of a nightmare. It’s only hours afterward that Guadagnino’s film will cohere for you and yield its buried treasures: the bonds of secret sorority, the strength of a line of dancers moving like a single organism, the present rippling with the muscle memory of the past. It’s so good, it’s scary.”
RogerEbert.com
“I’m racking my brain to find another example of an instance in which a director used his complete artistic freedom for the purpose of flaunting his absolute lack of artistic conviction. And I’m not coming up with much. If you loved Call Me By Your Name, you won’t recognize Suspiria. It’s too bad for my purposes that I didn’t out-and-out hate Call Me by Your Name, because if I had, I could say in addition to that that if you loved Call Me by Your Name, you deserve Suspiria.”
IndieWire
“Light on jolts and ‘holy sh-t moments, the film prefers to make your skin crawl through the dull terror of memory, the red stain of guilt, and the sickening historical truth that the members of a coven (or the people of a country) are more likely to absolve each other of their collective sins than hold themselves accountable. It’s grandiose stuff, even for a genre that’s recently been used as a scalpel to dissect the complex traumas of grief (The Babadook), family (Hereditary), and the African-American experience (Get Out), but Suspiria sustains a mesmeric hold for most of its 150-minute runtime.”
Variety
“The movie, while absorbingly crafted, is two-and-a-half hours of solemn slow-burn mystery. It makes you wonder what’s coming next — a remake of The Hills Have Eyes done in the style of Chantal Akerman? Hirokazu Kore-eda’s reboot of Audition? Suspiria has the virtues, but also the limits, of a lavishly cerebral high-end horror film. It holds your attention, and creeps you out at times, but it’s not scary, and it’s not really — dare I say it? — fun. By the time it drags itself to the finish line, you may think, ‘Okay, now we know what Suspiria looks like as an art film. Can we please go back to when it was just a garishly flamboyant piece of bat-house trash?’”
Guardian
“There are lots of pertinent ideas in this film, and Dakota Johnson herself is very good — although oddly she is just not in the film as much as she could have been: lots of key things happen elsewhere, to other, less interesting characters. Tilda Swinton herself always has charisma and elegance and she has some shrewd, mordant lines. She considers herself to be something of a revolutionary leader herself, an overturner of accepted values. ‘We must break the nose of every beautiful thing,’ she tells Susie, an astringent maxim, which becomes more sinister in context.
“This Suspiria is undoubtedly a labour of love for Guadagnino, an interesting variation on a theme, a cerebral act of connoisseurship. Yet storytelling pulse is missing and so is the scream of fear.”
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