Author: Lexy Perez / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
How does Luca Guadagnino’s remake compare to the 1977 original? Critics give their take.
The reviews are in for Luca Guadagnino’s elaborate remake of the horror classic Suspiria, and critics are scratching their heads.
The Italian director reinterprets the 1977 original centered around a mysterious dance academy — with Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz and Angela Winkler starring as students and faculty — that projects onscreen as a horror-filled dream.
Upon the release of the trailer, the film already sparked buzz among audiences, with an internet fanboy theory that Swinton simultaneously dons heavy prosthetics to take on the fake persona of Lutz Ebersdorf, credited as paying the role of a German psychotherapist.Despite the considerable ambition of the horror remake, critics failed to be bewitched by Guadagnino’s new version.
David Rooney’s take for The Hollywood Reporter critiques the film as being “unnecessarily drawn out” and consisting of “too many discursive shifts to build much tension.” Though he calls Swinton and Winkler “marvelous,” the reviewer calls most of the remaining featured roles “insufficiently individualized” to make them more than “an arch sisterhood distinguishable only by looks.”
Despite judging the film to be “aesthetically striking,” Rooney writes that the remake “remains distancing” and Guadagnino’s “ambitious homage” doesn’t “benefit from its more intellectualized gaze,” ultimately failing to measure up to the original cult movie. Overall Rooney writes that Guadagnino’s remake is a “head- scratcher” and his approach is “more muted in both palette and tone, “opting for insidious weirdness over shock and gore.
”Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian was also unimpressed with the film, dubbing it as “weirdly passionless” and having a “muddled” narrative focus that is more suited to be categorized as an “MA thesis” than a remake. Though writing that Guadagnino’s “reverence for the original” is evident — with the director incorporating “smart moments of fear” and “subliminal shivers of disquiet” — Bradshaw writes that the “spark of pure diabolical craziness of Argento” is gone with “indigestible new layers of historical meaning added” instead.
Focusing on characterization, Bradshaw found Swinton’s performance “a bit wasted” for “her character is anti-climactically written so that she delivers neither a payload of evil, nor a redemptive moral rescue, nor anything interesting in between.” Meanwhile, Bradshaw credited Johnson as being “very good” but was disappointed that the actress failed to have as much of a presence in the film as she could have.
Indiewire’s David Ehrlich shared the same sentiments in not perceiving the film as a remake but rather as “an estranged sibling” to the original where “only by drawing some blood” can moviegoers notice a relation between the two. Nonetheless, Ehrlich writes that the film “offers a richer, more explicit interpretation of that old nightmare” where he likens Guadagnino touching on the original’s anxieties to “picking at a scab.” With the film being pegged as horror, Ehrlich describes it as “more gross” than creepy and “more elegiac than it is gross.”
“Guadagnino’s wicked…
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