Suspiria (2018) arrives with a preemptive disclaimer: it is not a remake. Luca Guadagnino calls it a "cover version," and that framing is honest. Dario Argento's 1977 original is a pure sensory assault, all primary-coloured light and prog-rock scream. Guadagnino's version is grey, institutional, and nearly two and a half hours long. It shares a premise, a dance academy, a coven, and a name. Everything else it builds from scratch, and mostly from ruin.
The film is set in West Berlin in 1977, the year of Argento's film and also the year of the German Autumn, when RAF hijackings and the murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer kept the city in a state of coiled dread. That is not incidental. Guadagnino uses divided Berlin the way a good horror director uses a house: as a container for guilt that has nowhere to go. The city is split. The country is split. The coven at the Markos Dance Academy is split. And Dr. Josef Klemperer (Tilda Swinton, under heavy prosthetics as an elderly man) is a survivor of a different, earlier catastrophe, still searching for a wife the war took from him.
Dance as the film's actual horror engine
The central performance is Dakota Johnson as Susie Bannion, an Ohio Mennonite who arrives at the academy and is almost immediately granted the lead in a new work called Volk. Johnson is frequently underestimated, and Guadagnino knows it. Her Susie is not passive. She wants something from the coven, though the film withholds for a long time exactly what that is. What the film gives you instead is her body: the way she dances, with a kind of furious surrender, as if the choreography is happening to her rather than through her.
The dance sequences are genuinely unsettling. In the film's most visceral set piece, Susie rehearses alone while a second dancer, Olga, is flung around a mirrored room in the basement below, her body contorting and cracking in sympathy with every movement Susie makes. It's body horror without a monster visible. The horror is choreography itself: the idea that movement in one body can shatter another. This isn't too far from the concerns of Cronenberg's The Brood, where a body externalises interior anguish into physical violence on others. Guadagnino is working the same nerve.
Tilda Swinton and the film's structural gamble
Swinton plays three roles. Madame Blanc, the coven's artistic director and the film's most complex figure. Helena Markos, the aged and decaying witch-mother whose body is essentially a prop. And Klemperer, the old doctor whose thread runs parallel to the academy story and connects it to Nazi-era loss. The three-role casting is a statement about the film's preoccupations: identity, embodiment, and the way history lives in the flesh.
The Klemperer strand is the film's biggest gamble and, for many viewers, its biggest stumbling block. It slows the film considerably. But it carries the weight of the ending. Without Klemperer's grief, the film's final act is spectacle. With it, Suspiria (2018) becomes something stranger: a horror film genuinely interested in the question of whether absolution is possible, and whether the dead want it from the living at all.
What the ending actually does
The climax is chaotic and deliberately excessive. The coven ritual, shot in red darkness, is grotesque in a way that feels earned rather than gratuitous. Bodies tear. The hierarchy of the Markos Academy collapses inward on itself. Susie becomes something the film has been preparing you to accept without quite showing you the path.
Then comes the scene with Klemperer. Susie appears to him and offers him the one thing horror rarely offers anyone: the truth, and an end to not knowing. It's a quiet scene after enormous noise. Klemperer weeps. Susie tells him what happened to his wife, and then she takes his memory. It reads as a mercy. Whether it is one is left open.
The film's final image is of a face beginning to forget. Horror typically ends on a threat renewed, a hand rising from the grave. Suspiria (2018) ends on erasure. It's the most unsettling thing Guadagnino does: suggesting that the worst outcome isn't possession or death, but being left to carry knowledge that has no resolution.
Thom Yorke and the sound of institutional dread
Thom Yorke's score replaces Goblin's fluorescent urgency with something that sounds like a building remembering what happened inside it. Piano lines circle without landing. Vocals surface and sink. The score treats silence the way the best horror sound design treats it: not as absence but as a thing with weight. It's one of Yorke's strongest non-Radiohead works, and it serves the film precisely because it refuses to signal when to be afraid.
Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom drains the palette almost completely. This is a film of bone whites and exhausted greys, occasionally broken by stage blood that looks almost startling after so much monochrome restraint. The production design fills the academy with the textures of late-Soviet austerity: bare corridors, industrial mirrors, floors that seem designed for falling.
The verdict
Suspiria (2018) is not an easy recommendation. It's long, deliberately paced, and structured around a mystery it resolves in ways some viewers find unsatisfying. But it's a serious piece of work. Guadagnino makes a film about guilt as a collective condition, about what institutions do to bodies, and about the specific horror of a country trying to process atrocity while pretending to function normally. The dance academy is a perfect metaphor for all of that: a place where pain is refined into form and sold as beauty.
It won't replace Argento's version. It doesn't try to. What it does instead is occupy the same address and turn it into somewhere entirely different, colder, and harder to leave.