"It's all a mess. The one out there...the one in here...the one that's coming. Why is everyone so ready to think the worst is over?"
— Susie Bannon
Suspiria is a 2018 supernatural horror film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by David Kajganich, starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth and Sylvie Testud among others, with music composed by Thom Yorke. It is a very loose remake of the 1977 Dario Argento classic of the same name.
In 1977 West Berlin, Susie Bannon (Johnson) is a young American woman studying at one of the most renowned dance schools in the world: the Markos Tanz Company. As her skills gain the attention of head artistic director and choreographer Madame Blanc (Swinton), a series of mysterious disappearances occurs, leading Susie, her friend Sara (Goth), and the grieving elderly psychologist Dr. Josef Klemperer ("Lutz Ebersdorf" note ) towards an investigation into the school that reveals dark secrets that the instructors likely wished to keep hidden.
Guadagnino's Suspiria takes the original's story and atmosphere in a wholly different direction, changing its setting to the same year the original film was released and eschewing Argento's famous exaggerated color schemes for bleak, wintry tones, among other modifications. He has described the film as an homage to the emotions he felt watching the original more than an explicit remake of it.
Suspiria contains examples of:
- The '70s: The German Autumn of 1977 is a background event for the plot thread concerning Patricia and her disappearance from the academy. The Berlin Wall is prominent in nearly every exterior shot.
- Adaptation Dye-Job: Suzy in the original had dark brown hair, while Susie in the remake is a redhead.
- Adaptational Villainy: Susie. Rather than being the innocent Final Girl as in the original film, this Susie violently takes over the coven at the end of the film by assuming the power of Mother Suspiriorum, and may have been the witch undercover the whole time. On the other hand, Suspiriorum-Susie's civil treatment of Dr. Klemperer, Mercy Kills of the girls who were tortured, and eradication of the more heinous witches of the coven conversely throws the role of Suspiriorum the witch more toward Adaptational Badass and Adaptational Kindness. In the original film, Suspiriorum was completely evil and had significant weaknesses.
- Ambiguous Situation: Was Susie an ambitious-if-naïve dancer who was corrupted by the coven's magic into becoming a vessel for Mother Suspiriorum even before the Volk ritual was completed, or was she Mother Suspiriorum the whole time, and used the events of the movie as a way to discover who was loyal to her and exact revenge on those who weren't?
- And I Must Scream: Patricia, Olga, and Sara being put in intense Body Horror situations. The worst part is they are still dancing against their will while injured horribly. Sara was even disemboweled and was still standing like nothing happened.
- Birth-Death Juxtaposition: during the opening sequence, we see one of the carers at the dying Mrs. Bannion's house is pregnant.
- Bittersweet Ending: Susie becomes Mater Suspiriorum and defeats Markos and her cohorts with the help of Death itself and Madame Blanc survives despite a grievous injury. On the other hand, Patricia, Olga and Sara are dead (though are given graceful Mercy Kills) and Josef Klemperer has his memory wiped by Susie/Suspiriorum as a merciful gesture and to prevent him from exposing the existence of the witches.
- Body Horror: Oh, mother.
- A key sequence in the film features Olga having her body violently twisted and her bones broken. The worst part? She's still alive afterwards.
- Sara literally breaking a leg in the Volk sequence.
- Helena Markos is an intensely aged, hideously decrepit, naked witch who has a baby's arm sticking out of hers and a baby's face for a vagina.
- Susie's transformation into Mother Suspiriorum is signified by her forming a massive, gaping, bloody vagina in her chest.
- When Sara finally finds Patricia, the room she is in is filled with discarded yet still alive dancers. One of them appears to be made of two pairs of legs vertically fused together. This is easy to miss - it's at the left of the final moment of that scene writhing, not the similar but less horrific thing approaching Sara as she tries to dislodge Patricia.
- Sara, in a trance during the final ritual, being graphically disemboweled, remaining standing and seemingly-unaffected as her intestines are splattered to the ground.
- Color Wash: The climactic sequence bathes the chaos in a red filter.
- Composite Character:
- The remake's version of Sara takes on part of the role filled by the original Susie Bannion, being the one who leads the investigation into the coven.
- Susie is Mother Suspiriorum in this version.
- Creepy Blue Eyes: Sara switching eye colors with Susie in the Volk sequence onward. Susie's turn brown.
- Chromosome Casting: All of the film's significant characters are women except for Dr. Klemperer (who's still played by a woman.)
- Death by Adaptation: Olga, who simply disappeared from the story in the original film, gets the first prominent death scene in this version.
- Decomposite Character: Helena Markos and Mother Suspiriorum are two separate entities in this iteration; just who Mother Suspiriorum is becomes a key part of The Reveal (for more info, see Composite Character).
- Devil in Plain Sight: Unlike the 1977 original, the remake subverts this as the witches never kill anybody in a public place or do any other outlandish acts, and they erase the memories of the witnesses. Also, the recent RAF crisis and daily unrest gives them Plausible Deniability regarding the disappearances of their students.
- Drone of Dread: Hidden between dissonant pianos and Krautrock weirdness, quite a few numbers in Thom Yorke's score love this trope; "The Epilogue" takes the cake for its last minute almost verging on infrasound.
- Fan Disservice: In the finale, most of the dance company is naked, and Susie is wearing a Navel-Deep Neckline robe. Even though they're all young and beautiful, however, the jerky, frenetic movements of the dancers (plus the strong implication they can't stop), combined with Susie's Vagina Dentata right between her breasts and the general amount of blood and gore, makes it all very unsexy.
- Foreshadowing: There are hints that become evident on rewatch which foreshadow that Susie is Mother Suspiriorum.
- Before her audition, Susie nervously scratches her sternum. When she fully awakens as Mother Suspiriorum, she pulls the flesh of her sternum apart in a yonic gash over her heart.
- Much sound-design emphasis is placed on the strenuous nature of Susie's dance, particularly exhalations from the physical exertion. She also breathes deeply in scenes preparing to dance. The whole film, Susie is being associated with sighs.
- By the same token: at the end of the opening credits, the screen transitions to Susie at the German station while we keep hearing her dying mother's heavy breathing.
- We see that as a child, Susie was fixated on studying Berlin, perhaps subconsciously aware the coven of Mother Suspiriorum was located there.
- Susie is ex-Amish and abandoned the faith and her home because she didn't suit the lifestyle. Being an ancient witch who is "pre-God, pre-Devil" (as described by Klemperer) may have also had something to do with her incompatibility.
- At Susie's former home, shown during the opening credits, there is a framed adage hanging on the wall that says "A Mother is a woman who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take". The title of Mater Suspiriorum is being falsely claimed by Helena Markos. When the real Mater Suspiriorum arrives, she obliterates Markos and the witches who supported her.
- Susie's nightmares from Madame Blanc begin to mix in more concrete imagery from her own past, indicating that she is gaining control of the psychic link between herself and Blanc and has magic of her own.
- As the film progresses, Susie starts to get her own ideas on how the Volk dance should be performed, saying to Madame Blanc that her struggle in the jumping section comes from a feeling that it doesn't fit, and she later takes the dance off-beat and the official performance collapses. Given that Volk is actually a kinetic witchcraft ritual, it seems that the artistic clash was also a clash of magical instincts, with the Suspiriorum within Susie disagreeing with how Blanc has crafted the ritual, as well as knowing its purpose is dysfunctional as long as Susie is Suspiriorum.
- Miss Griffith seems to have a more sensitive, weak, empathic nature, as shown by her general silence, skittishness in her first scene overlooking Susie, and when she cries at the same time Olga does elsewhere. She also shocks the matrons by abruptly stabbing herself in the neck and ending her life. These all taken together seem to hint that she was able to sense something terrible, like Susie being the true Mother Suspiriorum, which would mean the tensions and pressures Griffith was unwillingly caught up in were entirely misguided and likely to doom those, including her, who voted for Markos.
- Susie's dying mother remarks that Susie is her sin and the stain she smears on the world, and a later scene where she passes shows the lighting turning red as a claw crosses her face. Susie being the ancient witch reborn would explain her mother's statement, and we see that the red lighting and black claw were manifestations of Death, who Suspiriorum commands in the finale moments later with the same red filter over the scene.
- A blink-and-you'll-miss-it costume hint that has roots in homage to the original film's genre— as Susie matures and joins the matrons' dinner, she wears a more assertive grown-up ensemble which is briefly seen paired with black leather gloves. The giallo film genre the original Suspiria hailed from famously used heavy costumes featuring black gloves (often focused on in kill scenes) to obscure the identity of the killer or primary threat in the film.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: When we first see Susie, she's walking down the stairs of a German train station. The platform on screen left is labeled SUSPIRIA. See it here.
◊ - From Nobody to Nightmare: Susie. It's a very different direction compared to the more typical heroine Suzy of the original.
- Gorn: Hoo boy. Argento would be proud.
- Homage: Director Luca Guadagnino has described the film as more of an homage to the feelings he had while watching the original movie for the first time as opposed to a strict retelling of the story.
- Humanoid Abomination: Helena Markos, as mentioned above. She looks like a mass of cancerous growths and has excess, vestigial limbs growing out of her body.
- How do you one-up Markos? By DEATH ITSELF arriving in the form of a tall, cadaverous woman that can kill with just a kiss.
- Improbably Female Cast: Much like the original film, the cast is largely female— even the lead male character, Klemperer, is played by Tilda Swinton in heavy makeup (something deliberately obscured in promotion, which included a fake story about a male actor playing him), keeping the main cast entirely female.
- Important Haircut: Susie gets a haircut in preparation for the dance exhibition, symbolizing her growth from ingénue to lead performer.
- Ironic Echo: "Death to any other mother." First said by Markos to Susie as she asserts her role as Mother Suspiriorum. Then re-stated by the true Mother Suspiriorum as she cleans house of all those who backed Helena Markos and her false claim to be Suspiriorum.
- Kiss of Death: Susie seals each request for a Mercy Kill with a kiss. The avatar of Death kills off Markos and her followers the same way, though the way it does so ends in Your Head Asplode with the exception or Markos who seems to have had her soul sucked out with her body beginning to decompose (further) instantly.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Of a sort. In the original film, it is a late reveal that the dance school is being run by a coven of witches. In this version, the audience learns this fact rather early on, and much of the plot is about the conflict between two factions within the coven.
- The Lost Lenore: Anke, who was revealed to have died in the hands of Nazis at Theresienstadt.
- Meaningful Echo:
- Earlier in the film, a staff member plays that she is Madame Blanc when detectives ask for her, saying "I am she" to get them through and out faster. Later in the film, Helena Markos claims herself to be Mother Suspiriorum, to which Susie, visiting the ritual, says "I am she", revealing herself to be the true lead witch.
- The witches' votes for Markos are repeated with talking-head shots at the climax of the film to remind the audience who in the coven was loyal to her while the true Mother Suspiriorum eliminates the Markosites.
- Mercy Kill: Given to a very willing Patricia, Olga, and Sara at the end, who have been brutally wounded, mutilated and are walking corpses.
- Naïve Newcomer: Susie, coming to the academy without any knowledge of its goings-on. She's also still quite sheltered as a girl who comes from an Amish background. Allegedly. It's not clear whether or not her ignorance was only an act the whole time.
- Nightmare Sequence: Susie has two equally bizarre ones that turn out to be Blanc's initial means of telepathically communicating with her.
- Not His Sled: The original film is a thriller mystery culminating in the reveal that the school is run by witches and that directoress Helena Markos is the most powerful witch, Mother Suspiriorum. In this film, witchcraft is an open element of the plot from the beginning, and many of the witches doubt if the legend about Mother Suspiriorum or Markos' claim to be her is true, and the jury is out on whether the shadowy Helena Markos really is the Mother of Sighs. The ending finally settles the matter: Helena Markos is not Mother Suspiriorum—Susie Bannion is.
- Oh, Crap!: Helena Markos when she realizes that Susie isn't what/who she appears to be.
- Ominous Walk: During the sabbath Death's avatar just casually strolls around the room, delivering its judgment on Markos' supporters one by one. They don't even try to flee as they know they would never escape Death.
- One-Word Title: Simply Suspiria, sharing a title with the original.
- Plausible Deniability: Unlike the original, which was based on the Anthropic Principle that all the outrageous murders of anybody who gets on the witches' bad side are just ignored by everybody except the protagonist, in this version the ongoing RAF crisis helps the witches hide the disappearances of their students from the authorities (they spin a story about Patricia's radical sympathies driving her to join the RAF and possibly getting her killed), and also they use hypnosis to get rid of the policemen who (rather reluctantly and superficially) investigate the disappearances.
- Popularity Cycle: This is how the Markos Tanz Company, or at least the coven part, works. The teachers have been looking for a new host body for the ailing Helena Markos/Mother Suspiriorum, so they have picked out young dancers whom they have sought to groom as vessels for Markos, aiding the targets' abilities as dancers/magical conduits by sharing and stealing power. If the dancers rebel and become a threat to the coven, they are tortured and end up in a state of living death. This grooming is shown as having happened to Patricia, and after Patricia's disappearance, they consider using Sara as their next attempt, but then pick Susie out to be the next victim once she arrives and wows the teachers. But Susie is the real Mother Suspiriorum.
- Practical Effects: Most of the gore and Body Horror makes use of these rather than CGI. This behind the scenes video goes into more detail (warning: contains spoilers and NSFW content).
- Psychic Link: Susie and Blanc form one. Blanc initially creates the bond through planting nightmares in Susie's head, and once she reciprocates the two are able to converse with their thoughts.
- Remake Cameo: Jessica Harper (the original Suzy) has a small role as Anke, Dr. Klemperer's long-lost wife.
- Right in Front of Me: The witches' final ceremony is brought to an abrupt end when Susie asks Markos which of the three mothers she was anointed for. When Markos responds with "Mother Suspiriorum", the name under which she has headed the coven, Susie responds, "I am she", turning the plot on its head.
- Sickening "Crunch!":
- During Olga's horrific torture, several of her bones break.
- When Sara leaves backstage before Volk, she's punished by holes forming in the floor; her leg falls into one, and it graphically snaps in half.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Thom Yorke's beautiful, forlorn piano-driven song "Unmade" plays as Susie/Mother Suspiriorum and the avatar of Death stroll around the sabbath chamber killing left and right, giving an otherwise disturbing sequence an air of haunting tragedy.
- Spiritual Antithesis: To the original film, believe it or not. Putting the two films side-by-side is one of the best examples possible of how two filmmakers can take virtually the exact same premise and come away with two radically different takes on it, from their visual styles to the beats of the story and how they progress. The original was a manic, colorful horror fairy-tale of a film, while this film is a retro arthouse drama discussing gender, motherhood, and political schisms, with its horror trending moodier and much more disturbing.
- The Stinger: Susie is seen touching the heart carved in Klemperer's cottage.
- Sweetie Graffiti: Klemperer and Anke's cottage has a heart carved into an outside corner with their initials split by the wall, just as the two people became after the war. The last shot of the film is of the cottage, now occupied by a new family, with the heart faded but still present. Susie is seen touching it at the stinger too.
- Unconventional Formatting: A poster of an upcoming performance in the film, some of its promotional materials, and even movie tickets make use of randomly aligned letters that look like the words they form just splattered into position. Even their Twitter account liked to invoke this every so often.
- Wham Line: When the figure of Death enters the ritual room, Susie asks Markos which of the Three Mothers appointed her leader of the Coven, to which Markos says Mother Suspiriorum did. Susie's response then twists everything on its head for the movie.
- Susie: I am she.
- Your Head Asplode: When Mother Suspiriorum returns to the coven, this happens to every member who had voted to keep Helena Markos in power.
