Freed from her Fifty Shades bondage, Dakota Johnson stars in this horror remake as an ambitious young dancer who wins a place at a prestigious ballet company in 1977 Cold War Berlin, only to discover that the place is a front for a coven of witches. Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Italian maestro Dario Argento’s surreal 1970s classic is a cauldron of heady ideas and images – but unlike the spine-tingling original, it’s just too full to come to the boil. Parts of the film are stunning, including Tom Yorke’s bewitchingly eerie score, the chilling, Pina Bausch-like dance sequences and Tilda Swinton’s dazzling turns as both the company’s imperious choreographer and an elderly male German psychotherapist (she also appears, beneath even more layers of latex, in a further role at the story’s climax). In the end, though, the movie’s drab, dun palette can’t compare with the gorgeous saturated colours of Argento’s original, and the overcooked plot is more silly than sinister.
Suspiria screens tonight at Cineworld Leicester Square at 7pm and at the Embankment Garden Cinema at 8.05pm, and at the Embankment Garden Cinema on Wednesday 17th October at 11am and at the Odeon Tottenham Court Road on Friday 19th October at 8.20pm, and goes on general release from Friday 16th November.
