A darkness swirls at the center of a world-renowned dance company, one that will engulf the troupe's artistic director, an ambitious young dancer and a grieving psychotherapist. Some will succumb to the nightmare, others will finally wake up.
Suspiria is a gorgeous, hideous, uncompromising film, and while it seeks to do many things, settling our minds about the brutality of the past and human nature is not one of them.
It’s only hours afterward that Guadagnino’s film will cohere for you and yield its buried treasures: the bonds of secret sorority, the strength of a line of dancers moving like a single organism, the present rippling with the muscle memory of the past. It’s so good, it’s scary.
Guadagnino dredges up the dead with such crazed purpose that his magnum opus is able to dance through its rough spots and make good on its foreboding promise.
It’s a long, deliriously filmic, primal banshee-howl of macabre imagination that leaves us hormonal and drunk on delusion: the beautiful, thrilling, lurid lie of cinema.