Suspiria (1977)

 

Suzy Bannion, a young American ballet student, arrives in Freiburg to study at the Tanz Akademie, a prestigious German dance school. Her arrival does not go well: she is caught in a torrential downpour, sees another woman flee the school in apparent terror, and then refused is entry to the building, forcing her to spend the night in town.

Perhaps not being at the school was a good thing, though, as the young woman Suzy saw fleeing gets murdered overnight.  Still, Suzy is determined to put the murder out of her mind and dedicate herself to her lessons.  Ballet is her life's ambition, after all.

But the longer she stays at the Tanz Akademie, the more she begins to suspect that there is something very, very wrong there, and her life may also be in danger ...

Suspiria was written and directed by Dario Argento, whose horror films of the 70s and 80s were often influential and successful.  It is one of his most renown works, but I was not much impressed by it.  I feel Suspiria is very much a case of style over substance.  Though to be fair, style was definitely always Argento's strong point.

And Suspiria certainly does have style in spades.  It is drenched with bright colours - reds and whites particularly - and stark, striking lighting, itself often coloured.  The camera also makes good use of shadows and pools of darkness to convey information or generate tension.

The soundtrack has also drawn a lot of attention over the years, and I ca see why.  It is cudgel-like in its approach; loud and verging on discordant. This is often effective at being unsettling, but on flip side can be hard to hear whispered conversations - of which there are quite a lot.

Conversely, much of the staging has not aged well.  There are several  knife attacks, all of which are a bit awkward and overly deliberate; and a 'bat attack' scene that induces giggles rather than gasps.

Script-wise, meanwhile, there are a lot of problems.  All the female characters are rather passive, their behaviour on the verge of just standing there and letting themselves be murdered.  There is something of an implicit explanation for that, but it's still not very satisfying.

Less satisfying still is that when Suzy finally decides things are too weird not to investigate, all the information she needs to solve things is pretty much immediately dumped into her lap.

Finally, the film never really explains how the villain's actions achieve their objective; or indeed what their objective even is, other than 'feed power to their leader'? Their intentions are nebulously defined at best and their method seems destined to draw much more attention that needed - why, if your front is a ballet school, would you target students at the school?  There's a whole town of potential victims out there that aren't obviously linked to you!