Three millions colours red
dir: Luca Guadagnino
2018
You might be asking yourself as to why I’m reviewing a six-year old movie when there are all sorts of films, contemporary or otherwise, that I could be finally getting around to seeing. I’ve been trying to make myself (almost at gunpoint) watch this for years, and I finally made myself do it.
Also, since Luca Guadagnino has the quite successful Challengers in cinemas at the moment, I thought I’d look back before looking forward.
Part of my reluctance to really watch this remake / redo all the way through is that I adore the original Suspiria from 1977. Seriously, one of my favourite films. That’s not the same as me saying I think it’s a great film. It’s definitely not one of the greatest flicks of all time.
It was a lot of things. It was like the most extreme alternate reality version of an Alice in Wonderland-like story that you’ll probably ever see that isn’t pornographic. It had a strong visual palate that’s been imitated continuously since then. It also had a magnificent soundtrack by progressive metal band Goblin that I had a CD copy of.
Remember CDs? They were great! Their cases were perfect for doing lines on…
But anyway. I’m not a purist that hates the idea of flicks being remade in principle, but the idea of someone remaking Suspiria filled me with trepidation and suspicion. I can’t claim to know Luca Guadagnino’s oeuvre that definitively, but I’ve seen enough to know that he’s a careful filmmaker. I loved his Io Sonno Amore / I Am Love way back in the day, which was when I thought he started working with Tilda Swinton. And I thought highly enough of Call Me By Your Name, before we got sick of Timothee Chalomet being everywhere, and before finding out Armie Hammer was a sadistic cannibal.
This flick is plenty faithful to the original film. Many of the same characters appear. The setting is similar, in that it’s a German dance academy, and the protagonist is again a naïf waif from America. Jessica Harper, who played the lead in the original back in the 70s, gets to have a cameo appearance, which is the price of entry.
But the new Susie Bannon is played by Dakota Johnson. She is a Mennonite from Ohio. When people ask her where she’s from, they don’t believe the answer.
How does a Mennonite, which is a step removed from the Amish (who they hate with a passion), get to be a dance star?
Isn’t that the thing about dance? With enough talent, drive, determination, hard work, starving yourself and nicotine you, too, can come from anywhere and become the lead in a hardcore dance troupe.
Suzy somehow travels to Germany during the Cold War, during the terrorist activities of the Baader-Meinhof Group and other general fuckery, and despite the fact that Mennonites probably don’t even believe in electricity, so how do planes work anyway? She’s all wide-eyed and golly gosh, but she really nails her audition, and all the other ladies think she’s great.
Unlike other flicks, unlike the original, they don’t pretend there isn’t some awful conspiracy going on. Straight up from the beginning, we know the academy is run by witches, living and deadish, and that they routinely kill or severely damage whoever isn’t with the program. In Suzy they see someone who will be a perfect vessel for one of the main witches that rules from the shadows and for whom the academy is named, being Mother Markos.
They don’t delay in telling us that there are three witch matriarchs, of a sort: The Mother of Darkness, the Mother of Tears and The Mother of Sighs. It’s the last one that concerns us, because her Latin name is the one from which the flick derives its title.
Well, when I say “concerns us”, we are worried that these evil witches, who consume the youth and lives of young clueless dancers, will sacrifice our heroine Susie, or one of her friends, for their dark purposes.
Sara (Mia Goth) is friendly enough with Susie, and looks out for her, and was close friends with another girl who’s gone missing, being Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz). She, too, has questions about what’s going on, and wants to look out for Susie.
It’s such a shame, because she hasn’t watched the original from 1977, so she doesn’t know what happens to everyone else other than Susie.
What a career Mia Goth has carved out for herself! She has been in so many great horror flicks thus far. I’m not saying this flick is great, but she has been phenomenal thus far in Ti West’s trilogy of flicks that started with X, then completely transcended that with Pearl, and I really hope they stick the landing with MaXXXine later this year. And she put in a terrifying turn in Infinity Pool last year, where she made Alexander Skarsgard’s life a living hell.
Here she’s just a curious ingénue who’s not the main character, and we all know what happens to those kinds of people in these kinds of films.
The original flick was an hour and a half. This version is nearly 3 hours long. I guess if you love witchy shit, this is way more value for time / money. It’s just sooooo long, and there is so much deliberate flatness within it.
So many witches… I don’t know about this flick, just yet. I think I liked it, in that it’s all so carefully constructed. It definitely has at least a couple of horrific scenes, but most of it doesn’t really feel like a horror flick. At its best it achieves the feeling of a fever dream.
At its worst it feels like stretched out pretentious twaddle. I adore Tilda Swinton, and have no problems with any of her choices here, whichever character she’s playing. Oh yeah, I haven’t even mentioned who she plays. She plays Madame Blanc, who is de facto in charge of the academy and the dancing, even though just over half of the other members of the coven support the seemingly absent Mother Markos.
That’s the thing about seemingly absent Greek mothers, they might not be visible, but they still influence things from the great beyond…
I might be mistaken about this, but Madame Blanc’s main motivation seems to be manipulating Susie into becoming a literal vessel for Mother Markos to either embody or be reborn through, and the way to do it is through dark rituals pretending to be dance routines. And even then, even if it’s something that these witches have been doing for decades / centuries, at the very least since before the Nazis, Madame Blanc only now seems to be having some issues with it.
The witches themselves are a formidable bunch. They are quite powerful, and can easily fuck everyone up who gets close to figuring them out. They also really get off on humiliating men and their tiny middle aged penises.
I think their power derives less from the three supposed matriarchs, and more from their bond, which has I guess some positive aspects (for them) and some negative aspects (for anyone who falls out with them). Their power comes from being women, but also from cackling, laughing, sighing or dancing.
I think. None of this stuff is really that clear, but I don’t think it needs to be. Dark evil magic that destroys or mutilates people doesn’t have to be explained scientifically – it’s just evil. Evil intent, evil action, evil spooky action at a distance.
When a psychiatrist, an old man (Tilda Swinton, no jokes) who had been treating one of the dance students, notifies the authorities that something hinky might be happening at the school, two detectives appear and try to question the matrons. They somehow control their minds, get them to strip naked, and then mock their cocks to their faces, and hold shiny vicious hooks near them.
That’s not the strange bit. I mean, it’s deeply strange, but that’s not where the real weirdness lies. At the same time as they’re doing this ritual cackling humiliation stuff, Sara and Susie are trying to Nancy Drew their way through an admin office, trying to find out info on what happened to some former students. As Sara is distracted, Susie looks through a door and sees the witches doing their witchy thing.
And she smiles, closes the door, and goes back to what they’re doing, which isn’t much of anything.
She doesn’t care. I deeply wondered why at the time.
And then, after an absolute age, we get to the ending. It’s definitely an ending. And we somewhat understand why.
Holy shit, what a fucked up ending.
People have criticised the elements added to the film, like about life in Germany in 1977, or about the good doctor, and his lingering guilt about the Holocaust and his wife’s disappearance. I have no problem with any of that stuff. Give me more of that stuff, about drab life in a beige and grey place engineered to quash the individuality out of the people living there, and the awful furniture and design aesthetics of East Germany before the walls fell.
I don’t know what you’d cut out of this to make it less bloated. Without the (awful) intro with Patricia, you don’t have the link to the good doctor, whose purpose overall is to be a witness to the magnitude of the witches’ evil. Without Sara stumbling about to figure out what’s going on in this strange place, you’d have Susie alone pretending to be scared for two and half hours before showing how scared she isn’t, and that would grow tiresome.
I don’t really know that the flick is saying anything that deep about matriarchies, gynocracies, female only spaces or dark magic (dark magic = bad is probably a safe bet). The most important thing for me to remind myself is that all of these ideas arose from the opium dreams of Thomas De Quincey way back in the 1800s. He smoked a shitload of opium, had some vivid hallucinations, and wrote a bunch of nonsense down, that I’m sure made a stack of sense when he was hallucinating, but a little less once he sobered up. Even then some of the more powerful stuff he wrote captured peoples’ imaginations, and inspired a bunch of films, as if some of the things he imagined were powerful archetypes, linking as they do with either Roman mythology or the Jungian shadow self, plus random images from De Quincey’s own squalid life.
The climactic sequence in Suspiria, had De Quincey ever watched the film, would have made his head explode with terror.
I feel like the final scene between a certain someone and the good doctor, revealing to him some powerful aspect of the past, in order to give him some peace, is misguided not in its intent, but in its resolution, which to me makes it make no sense whatsoever. You can’t be a witness to something if you’re made to forget.
And there’s a post-credit scene which I haven’t been able to figure out, which potentially means either that one of the Mothers will be coming after us, or that she can manipulate our reality as well, which is just as bad.
But I liked aspects of it, a lot of aspects of it. What a strange film, but then again, shouldn’t it be?
8 times I have strong issues with their pedagogical techniques at this school out of 10
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“Love and manipulation, they share houses very often. They are frequent bedfellows.” - Suspiria 2018
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