Review #242: Suspiria (1977)

This review was originally written in October 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #96: Suspiria (1977)

(I just noticed that these last two movies- Carrie and Suspiria- both had 2010s remakes starring Chloe Grace Moretz. I didn't mean to put them side-by-side, that's just how it happened.)

Suspiria is a film about Suzy Bannion, an American girl who travels to Germany to join a prestigious ballet school. Once there she becomes strangely ill, other students are mysteriously murdered, and she begins to learn of a nefarious plot among the staff that could mean dark intentions are afoot.

I spent the first thirty minutes of this film asking myself, "What the hell is this movie?" It redeemed itself by the end- not in a sense that I enjoyed it, but in a sense that I understood what the hell it even was, but I don't think this is a good film and I say without exaggeration that some of the sequences in it are so nonsensical that I can't accept them as being canonical to the story. There's a five- or ten-minute sequence near the beginning that I had to watch several times because I didn't understand any of the logistics of what I was seeing (a girl goes from the school to some other building, gets more backstory than the protagonist gets in the entire film, and is then attacked and seemingly brought to yet another completely different location before being killed three separate ways), another part has the protagonist Suzy getting sunlight from a chef's knife reflected onto her face despite being in a dimly-lit hallway, and another has a character jumping into a room full of barbed wire (?) because the entire floor of barbed wire was offscreen, and therefore impossible for her to see it despite it being directly in front of her. There's also a point where Suzy learns that the school staff are sneaking off to a secret location where they conduct their dark arts, but it's not through a secret passage or anything, it's just through... the big double doors at the end of the hall? Like, did she not know those doors were there?

There's very clearly a strong artistic vision at play here- the sets are incredibly colorful and there's an incredible visual aesthetic to everything, but sometimes it goes so over the top that it becomes painful to watch. (I was watching this with headphones, and the volume difference between the dialogue and the score was WAY TOO BIG. I was constantly having to crank up the volume to hear what people were saying, and then risking having my eardrums blown out the next time a scene needed a thirty-second musical sting.) Speaking of the music, it got to be kind of formulaic at times. Scenes tended to be: Dialogue dialogue dialogue, LOUD MUSIC FOR A WHILE as the camera slowly panned from one part of the scene to the next, then dialogue dialogue dialogue, MORE LOUD MUSIC as the camera pans over some more scenery, dialogue dialogue etc. It almost felt like the director couldn't decide between telling a story and showing off the cool set decoration he'd arranged. (Just an interjection- according to the IMDB trivia, director Dario Argento would blare the music as loud as possible on set as well! So this was an intentional decision! Does he think LOUD MUSIC automatically equates to tension? Because it seems that way.)

I just didn't really find this movie compelling. Despite some weird happenings, no clues are given as to what exactly is going on in this film until about an hour in, at which point the word "witches" is uttered for the first time, and then ten minutes later a new character is introduced to rattle off a ton of exposition and then disappear from the film entirely. There was no way to guess that witches were involved before this because there was no sign of anything witchcraft-related (unless you assume every evil happening in a female-run organization to be witchcraft-related) and once the witch card is played, you get all of the exposition shoved down your throat in one single thrust and then it's gone forever. Again, it feels like the director couldn't decide what kind of an experience he wanted to make so he just inelegantly plopped the exposition in one spot, sandwiched between dialogue dialogue dialogue and some LOUD MUSIC. I also have no frame of reference for what the villain is capable of- what they can and can't do seems to fluctuate wildly between scenes, and the murder at the beginning of the film I mentioned earlier seems completely unnecessary given the logistics of how it took place and what we see happen to other victims later on. It just seems like kind of a writing mess, like they hadn't yet decided what the movie was about when they shot the first scene.

The final ten minutes of the film were pretty good. The climax was tense, it was creepy, and I really liked the effect they used for the headmistress. But like so many of these films it was too little too late and a good ending can't salvage an hour and forty minutes of bad.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Ceiling Maggots

Weird Audio: When I was watching this movie the version I had downloaded had some significant audio delay, with the audio trailing at least a full second behind the video. For this reason, after seeing the credits were in Italian, I honestly couldn't tell whether the English lines being spoken were dubbed in or not (for all I knew the movie was made for Italian-speaking audiences and I just had an English dub, the delay stopped me from recognizing if the actors were speaking the lines in English). Now that I've seen the movie and I can do some research, it turns out the lines WERE dubbed, despite being in English anyway. The actors' voices were intentionally not recorded while filming (apparently there'd be times when the actors would be shooting a scene while a set was being hammered offscreen), and it was always Dario Argento's intention to record the lines at a later time. There's even a scene where one of the actors didn't speak English at all, so someone offscreen was feeding him his lines phonetically while it was being shot. This is just one of many decisions from the director that makes no sense to me whatsoever.