Sus­piria

‘Sim­u­lacrum’ is the sin­gle word that elder­ly psy­chol­o­gist Dr Jozef Klem­per­er (played by one Lutz Ebers­dorf, a pseu­do­nym for Til­da Swin­ton) writes in his case notes as he lis­tens to an unhinged Patri­cia Hin­gle (Chloë Grace Moretz) rave in his apart­ment cum con­sult­ing room.

In this open­ing sequence to Luca Guadagnino’s long-ges­tat­ing remake of Dario Argento’s baroque hor­ror clas­sic from 1977, the very sce­nario that Patri­cia is lay­ing out – that the Hele­na Markos Tanz­gruppe is in fact a coven of witch­es – makes it clear that we are watch­ing a sim­u­lacrum, or imi­ta­tion of the orig­i­nal. Yet no copy can ever be exact­ly the same as its orig­i­nal, and even if the omi­nous site of the Hele­na Markos Tanz­gruppe, with its mir­rored inte­ri­or walls, is haunt­ed by the reflec­tive curse of com­par­isons, it also dances to its own tune.

Men­non­ite-raised Susie Ban­nion (Dako­ta John­son) joins the com­pa­ny and quick­ly finds her way into the lead part of Volk, the group’s sig­na­ture rou­tine since it was cre­at­ed by the school’s prin­ci­pal instruc­tor Madame Blanc (Swin­ton) in 1948. Susie is also caught in the mid­dle of a cri­sis of lead­er­ship occur­ing behind closed doors. The school’s all-female staff are divid­ed as to whether the age­ing, ail­ing founder Hele­na Markos (Swin­ton) should remain at its head, or whether her protégée Blanc should take over – although the major­i­ty remains with Markos.

These ten­sions with­in reflect those with­out. The film is set not in the fairy tale Freiburg of Argento’s orig­i­nal, but in a rainy, snowy Berlin in the year of the original’s release. It’s an express­ly divid­ed Berlin, still caught in the guilt and shame of World War Two while fac­ing an ongo­ing con­fronta­tion between the estab­lish­ment and, in its last gasp, the Baad­er-Mein­hof Group.

The school is sit­u­at­ed along­side that great sym­bol of Ger­man divi­sion, the Berlin Wall, through which Jozef reg­u­lar­ly pass­es to vis­it the East Ger­man dacha where he had once spent hap­py time with his Jew­ish wife Anke (Jes­si­ca Harp­er, who played Ban­nion in the orig­i­nal) before she van­ished in 1943. Jozef ​’s abid­ing, back­ward- look­ing love for Anke is enshrined in the graf­fi­to of an ini­tialled heart, itself divid­ed across the cor­ner of the dacha’s out­er walls.

The impulse of just over half the witch­es to vote con­ser­v­a­tive­ly for Markos, or of Jozef to dwell in a romance long past, mir­rors the attach­ment of so many view­ers to Argento’s daz­zling­ly bril­liant 41-year-old film, even as Guadagni­no strives, like Susie, to go ​‘off book’ and intro­duce change while still respect­ing what has gone before.

In the prac­tice ses­sions for the tra­di­tion­al Volk, a bal­ance between these con­flict­ing forces is open­ly rehearsed, even as the film sub­dues the original’s poly­chro­mat­ic colour scheme, mutes its over­whelm­ing score (replaced here with Thom Yorke’s qui­eter melan­cholic melodies) and stretch­es out its dura­tion, in an active effort to ring in its own changes. Though split down the mid­dle between mimet­ic tra­di­tion and rev­o­lu­tion­ary vari­a­tion, noth­ing about this sim­u­lacrum is half-hearted.