That said, even though it doesn’t happen very often, every now and then you get a remake that is less a duplication of the original and more something in conversation with the original - something that takes the basic structure or premise or what-have-you and then deviates from it in specific, potentially meaningful ways. If it’s done right, you’ve got a film that’s compelling on its own AND gives people who also saw the original a new way to think about it. Like I said, I don’t see this very often, but one that immediately comes to mind for me is We Are What We Are, the remake of Somos Lo Que Hay that made a couple of important inversions - first, it relocated the story from an urban setting to a rural one, and second, it flipped the genders of the protagonists. So what started off as a story about poverty and desperation in the big city, and the role of men in providing for their families and the ways in which they failed to do so turned into a story about preserving old ways, old traditions, and the role of women in maintaining a family and household. The basic bones of the story didn’t change much, but specific, deliberate deviations from the original put an entirely different spin on it.
Remakes like that can be interesting. Suspiria (2018) likewise makes some interesting, deliberate choices in response to the original, but for me, one byproduct of those decisions was an end result that felt overlong and somewhat cold and detached.
This is the story of Susie Bannion, a young woman from a Mennonite family in Ohio, who travels to Berlin to audition for a place in the highly esteemed, highly selective Markov Dance Company. She’s never had any formal training, comes without any references, and only manages the audition because she caught one of the instructors on a good day. It is Berlin in 1977, a city still divided into East and West by the aftermath of World War II, a city gripped by the terror actions of the Red Army Faction. It is a time of chaos and upheaval, and into this city comes this young woman from the Midwest of the United States, untutored, whose natural capacity for dance gets her immediate admission to the school. As it so happens, a student named Patricia has just left the school under mysterious circumstances. There are rumors that she vanished to go underground with an RAF cell, and rumors that it was something darker.
Meanwhile, the teachers, a large group of older women, gather to discuss the new girl, and how she may be of use to them.
The original Suspiria was a riot of color, texture, and sound, with every frame leaping off the screen and an insistent, layered sound design, and the remake forsakes those for the drab Brutalist winter of 1977-era Berlin and a soundtrack best described as unobtrusive. Although the original was set at a dance academy, it barely featured any dance at all, and the protagonist was thrown into the middle of a hostile environment full of vain, selfish students who resent the new girl. Here, dance figures heavily throughout as an expression of ritual, and Susie is welcomed warmly. It’d be easy to go the gothic route, to have this ingénue thrown headfirst into a snake pit of repression and sadism (sort of the go-to for dance academies in film), and this film doesn’t really do that. It presents a rigorous, but not vicious, academic environment, within which some really weird shit is gradually revealed to be happening. The original got over primarily on excess, the remake emphasizes restraint.
So, as a response to the original version, this approach is interesting to me. But I’m not sure how well it works as a horror movie as a result. The original wasn’t especially subtle or nuanced, but it had this lunatic energy that kept pushing you forward as things got weirder and weirder, and on that level it worked. The remake stretches out and takes a fair amount of time to develop its ideas. Instead of locating everything at the academy, it bounces back and forth between what’s happening at the academy, an investigation into the academy by a psychologist who was the last person to see Patricia alive, and Susie’s home in Ohio. It isn’t confusing - the connections between the three stories becomes clearer as the film moves along - but it does lend it a slightly desultory, disconnected feeling. In isolation, there are very striking moments (this is one of those films that does an excellent job of juxtaposing the horrifying with the mundane), but there isn’t a lot of narrative momentum, and at 2 and a half hours give or take there’s a lot of time for tension to dissipate.
Make no mistake, this is a horror film. The dance academy is run by a coven of witches, yes, and they’re trying to prepare for some very important ritual, but it takes its own sweet time to get there, and it’s mostly played very low-key. I think this is a problem because I think it’s important for horror films to evoke and sustain a mood. Technically the film is executed well - it’s shot on period-appropriate film stock, which gives it a singular look that again speaks to the original - but it’s kind of cold and airless, so the effect is ultimately one of a film more easily appreciated from a distance than engaged with directly. I guess that makes sense as part of the conversation with the original film as well, insofar as the original got over on feverish intensity, on pushing everything so hard over the top that the audience couldn’t help but get caught up in it. It makes for an interesting intellectual exercise, but as a horror film, it could benefit from a wider dynamic range in the acting and a tighter edit, one that would pull the audience in and not let them go until the bloody, crazed denouement.
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