SUSPIRIA
A film review by Mike Watson
Copyright 1997 Mike Watson
DIRECTED BY: Dario Argento SCREENPLAY: Dario Argento, Thomas De Quincey, Daria Nicolodi STARRING: Jessica Harper RUNTIME: 93 minutes RATING: 4 out of 5
"Psycho meets the Exorcist with no holds barred". A blurb like that sounds like desperate publicity for some low budget, third rate rip-off. But no, this tacky plug comes from the poster for SUSPIRIA, perhaps Italian horror director Dario Argento's most consistently successful film.
What impresses most in re-watching this surrealistic, supernatural thriller is that Argento's directorial flair and stylish visuals are matched by a near-fully coherent narrative. Screenplays have always been his Achilles heel; confusing subplots, gaping holes, totally illogical incidents and reactions. No question: Argento has always been a better director than a writer. Fortunately, he gets the plotting pretty well right with SUSPIRIA, taking his cue from a book by Thomas De Quincey called "Suspiria de Profundis". The film's storyline suffers from no major lapses in logic, provided one can accept the premise of a ballet school being a front for a coven of witches.
Jessica Harper plays an American who travels to Germany to further her studies in dance. Arriving at the school late at night in driving rain, she sees a girl leave and run into the storm in a clearly distressed state. What happens next - and I don't make the comparison lightly - is a murder sequence that for intensity, shock value and sheer directorial flair ranks alongside Alfred Hitchcock's infamous shower scene in PSYCHO. It's quite possibly a homage to Hitchcock, but with its baroque sets, graphic gore and brilliantly chaotic musical accompaniment by the Gothic rock group Goblin, this stunning sequence remains very much Argento's own.
Though nothing else quite equals the intensity of SUSPIRIA'S opening 15 minutes, the film continues to be never anything less than engrossing as Harper begins her own investigations and slowly comes to realise this is no ordinary ballet school. We meet an assortment of slightly sinister characters, most notably the head ballet teacher played by Alida Valli in another one of those delicious sour-old-matriarch-from-hell roles she does so well. Several more violent murders ensue, including a startling scene in a deserted square where a blind man is...well, I wouldn't want to spoil things now, would I? And the film's climax, staged amid secret corridors and hidden rooms, has a Gothic ghoulishness that's most impressive.
The English language versions of most Argento movies usually suffer trimming, and not just for the violence - DEEP RED and PHENOMENA, for example, have been appallingly hacked about. Fortunately, the cuts to SUSPIRIA (about 7 minutes in this version) have not adversely affected the film. The dubbing of the Italian actors into English is quite competently done, too, excepting one appalling and unintentionally hilarious effort with a conversation between Harper and a professor about the history of witchcraft in the region.
And the soundtrack? It is interesting to imagine what power the film would have lost if it had been scored by someone else. As it stands, the use of Goblin's music in SUSPIRIA is outstanding. Apparently, Argento played the soundtrack on location while filming so the actors could hear the music as they acted out their parts. A stereo video player adds greatly to the viewer's overall experience. Even better, see SUSPIRIA in a cinema, where you'll get the added bonus of widescreen.
And the colours! Deep reds, eerie blues, a superb use of shadow and contrast. The cinematography of Luciano Tovoli, whose more recent credits include REVERSAL OF FORTUNE and SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, is uniformly superb. A nod also must go to production designer Giuseppe Bassan for his wonderful baroque interiors. These kinds of settings are crucial to the atmosphere of Argento's more surreal excursions, the other most notable example being INFERNO (1980) on which Bassan also worked.
SUSPIRIA is the film that broke Dario Argento into the major league of European directors, and it is fully deserving of its cult status. The gore is at times a little excessive and overstated - that's always been one of Argento's shortcomings - but overall this is a fascinating, compelling example of Italian horror.
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