SUSPIRIA
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Ranks with HALLOWEEN and PSYCHO as one of the most viscerally terrifying pieces of moviemaking ever. An artful and visually sumptuous scare.
For all of his other shortcomings, Dario Argento has made some of the best-looking horror movies in existence. And some of the most mortifying. SUSPIRIA is the creme de la creme of his career, a *really* scary story that will give even sophisticated audiences a good jolt.
Jessica Harper stars as Susie Banyon, a ballet student who has gone to a special conservatory in Austria to study dance. The movie sets her up quickly and efficiently: she's not a genius, but she has a kind of taciturn stubborness about her that's endearing, and will help see her through the more ghastly moments in the movie. The night she arrives, it's raining and thundering (of course), and she blunders into a student who's running out of the conservatory. She half-hears her shout out something, but it's lost in the wind. The next night that girl is murdered horribly, in a scene which had many of the seasoned horror fans around me raking the fabric off of the couch arms. (The brawny arms of the killer, by the way, are the director's -- a consistent visual device of his which he refuses to discuss in interviews. Hmm.)
At the conservatory, Harper is instantly surrounded by all manner of eldritch characters. Some are a lot less innocent than others, of course, and the way Harper pieces together what's *really* going on behind the walls (literally) is ingenious. I will not reveal the deeper aspects of the plot, even though it's not too difficult to figure out. It's the tone and mood of the movie that matters more in this case, both of which are superb.
Be warned that SUSPIRA delivers some incredibly gruesome moments. One scene has one of the girls falling into a pit of barbed wire and being slashed horribly -- and then having her throat slit as she's trying to climb out. Another scene features an unbelievable number of maggots coming through the walls and ceiling. (The last one is especially memorable because the explanation turns out to be relatively mundane!)
Technically, the film is excellent. This is a beautiful movie -- the screen fills with bright, garish colors (mostly red, of course), and the set design is eccentric and striking. I watched the uncut US laserdisc edition from Image, which is now regrettably out of print, but is letterboxed and features the full-length version of the movie plus two trailers. If you can find the uncut edition, watch it in lieu of all others. On an empty stomach.
Three and a half out of four Danskins.
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