Suspiria

There’s an image from Suspiria that stays with you: a young American arriving at a gloomy, nervous dance academy in West Berlin and, almost before the credits finish, things start to go spectacularly wrong. Luca Guadagnino’s film trades simple shocks for a slow, escalating dread that treats its horror like a force of history rather than a cheap jolt.

It’s a big, deliberate film — released in 2018 and running 152 minutes — that asks you to follow it into uncomfortable emotional territory. Dakota Johnson is cast as Susanna “Susie” Bannion, the Mennonite girl from Ohio who turns up at the Markos Academy; Tilda Swinton plays several of the academy’s older figures. That casting gives the film a strange, unsettling centre: youthful arrival meets ancient institutions. Underneath the splatter and the witchcraft, Suspiria is stubbornly interested in a handful of serious ideas — family, mortality and the cost of freedom. That mixture of intimate human stakes and grotesque physical horror is what keeps people talking about it: the movie feels like it’s aiming for something beyond genre posturing, and mostly, it lands there.

The movie opens with a practical, chilling premise: the Markos Dance Academy is already in trouble because a student, Patricia Hingle, has disappeared after telling her psychotherapist that the school is run by witches. That missing‑person mystery is the pulse of the story — something real to worry about amid the occult business.

Klemperer, Patricia’s therapist, starts out doubtful but grows suspicious as he pulls at the loose threads. His unease gives the film a second vantage point: not only do we watch Susie move into the academy’s orbit, we watch an outsider try to understand what’s happening behind closed doors.

Inside the studio, ordinary rehearsal gives way to something far more violent. A Soviet student, Olga, storms out upset at Madame Blanc; during practice Susie’s aggressive dancing somehow begins to physically afflict Olga, leaving her horribly ravaged. That moment flips the movie from whispered conspiracy into immediate, appalling consequence.

Meanwhile a student called Sara pokes around where she shouldn’t, finds secret corridors and relics, and the sense of a covered‑up life at the academy grows. All of these pieces — the vanished girl, the sceptical therapist, the dangerous choreography and the inquisitive student — lock together and make the coven feel both intimate and inescapable. By the time Susie is led toward the academy’s darker rites, the premise has already earned our attention.

Susie arrives as an outsider: an American from a Mennonite family in Ohio who finds herself at a prestigious but secretive dance school in West Berlin. That background matters because the film constantly returns to the idea of where you come from — and what you’re allowed to leave behind.

She’s not merely a body in class; she moves quickly into Blanc’s orbit and is made lead in the academy’s new piece. The story positions her as both student and vessel: she’s led into a chamber where the matrons wait with Mother Markos, for whom Susie is meant to become a new host. The tension between being chosen and being used sits at the core of her screen presence.

The film forces Susie into a terrible choice about belonging. At one point she renounces her own mother — who dies back in Ohio — a private, almost ritual severing that’s described plainly rather than melodramatically. That renunciation gives her the space to claim something else; it reframes the coven’s talk of family into a genuine, and very costly, act of self‑definition.

When the moment comes for Susie to reveal herself as Mother Suspiriorum and to confront Markos, the movie asks us to read her both as emerging power and as a creature born of violent, generational systems. She matters because she is where the film’s themes — family, control, liberation and mortality — converge.

At first glance Suspiria is a witches‑and‑dance horror. Underneath, it’s primarily occupied with family — not warm domesticity but the way families shape, demand and sometimes damage. Susie’s renunciation of her mother and the academy’s insistence on creating a new lineage make family into a form of power to be seized or escaped.

Mortality and lifespan thread through the film. The academy is run by aged matrons; the film gives space to bodies that are worn, violated, ageing and, in some cases, willing to die. That attention to bodies ageing — and to the ways some characters plead for an end — keeps the horror anchored in human terms rather than abstract dread.

Freedom is not handed out gently. Characters who try to leave or speak the truth find themselves trapped or punished, and liberation is bound up with terrible choices. The film repeatedly asks whether any escape from an institution of power is clean, or whether freedom simply exchanges one ownership for another. Loss and exploitation sit alongside those themes: students vanish, logs are erased, relics and secrets hide abuses. The movie makes exploitation feel mundane — an everyday governance of bodies and careers — which is why the horror feels less like spectacle and more like a social weather system that everyone breathes.

Released in 2018, Suspiria sits squarely in the later 2010s. That placement matters: the decade made room for genre films that were willing to be long, odd and morally complicated rather than merely efficient.

Because it’s a 2010s movie in both year and ambition, it feels permitted to take its time: to build character, to let dread accumulate, and to treat horror as a vehicle for serious ideas rather than a sequence of quick shocks.

That patience — and the decision to retell a well‑known tale in a way that foregrounds human consequences — is very much of the decade’s cinematic temperament: riskier, slower and often more interested in discomfort than easy catharsis.

Put simply, being a 2018 film gives Suspiria a licence to be demanding. It expects viewers to meet it halfway, and that insistence is one of the things that makes it unmistakably a product of its moment.

Many of Suspiria’s core ideas still land. The story of a young outsider arriving at an enclosed institution, and the way an older generation exerts control, feels frank and resonant. Susie’s origin as a Mennonite from Ohio and her move into the academy keep the stakes emotionally clear: you understand what she’s risking and what she’s abandoning.

Certain sequences retain a visceral punch. For example, the episode where Olga tries to flee and finds herself trapped in a mirrored room is still a tight, unsettling piece of storytelling: a body attempting escape and finding only architecture that betrays it. That basic horror of being contained by the places meant to train you remains affecting.

The film’s attention to ageing and memory also plays differently now but remains potent. Klemperer, who ends up confined to his bed and later encounters Susie at his home, embodies a fragile human ledger of what has been lost; scenes about failing memory and witness still read as quietly tragic rather than merely plot devices.

Not everything ages the same way — the film asks a lot of patience, and that will divide viewers — but where it concentrates on human relationships, endings and the cost of freedom, Suspiria still has something sharp to say.

Suspiria keeps a foot in two worlds: the gothic ritual of an old witch story and a modern appetite for morally difficult narratives. The framework is simple — a student disappears after telling her psychotherapist the academy is run by witches — but the film spins that into questions about who inherits power and what price is paid for survival.

The movie’s cast of characters — from the searching Patricia and the inquisitive Sara to the ageing matrons — creates a community that’s both alluring and poisonous. Susie befriending Sara, and later being led into the academy’s darker rites, turns the school into a place where friendship, ambition and danger are braided together.

The way Susie ultimately reveals herself as Mother Suspiriorum and then summons Death to end the old order is brutal and ambiguous: she grants death to characters who have been physically ravaged, and the academy, disturbingly, resumes life as usual the next day. That refusal to reward simple justice gives the film a lingering unease that viewers keep coming back to. Finally, the film leaves an image in the post‑credits moment — Susie staring approvingly at something outside the academy — which refuses to tuck the story into tidy moral boxes. It’s the kind of ending that keeps the conversation going: questions about who survives, why, and what counts as victory remain open.

Yes — if you’re prepared to be challenged. Suspiria (2018), directed by Luca Guadagnino and fronted by Dakota Johnson as Susie, is not a comfort watch. It begins with a sensible, unnerving mystery — a student vanishes after warning that the academy is controlled by witches — and uses that throughline to stage confrontations about family, mortality and agency.

The film asks you to sit with difficult scenes: bodies that have been ravaged, old loyalties that refuse to die, and a new power that arrives by way of renunciation and sacrifice. Susie’s decision to sever ties with her mother and then to reveal herself as Mother Suspiriorum reframes the story as an ugly kind of succession. That choice makes the movie morally complicated in a useful way.

It’s also long and deliberate — 152 minutes — and that pacing is part of the deal. The film rewards patience with ideas and images that linger; it will frustrate viewers expecting tidy resolutions or a brisk horror ride. If you like your genre films to demand attention and to leave you unsettled rather than soothed, this one will repay the effort.

So should you watch it? If you want a horror film that treats witches as a means to talk about who gets to belong, who survives and what freedom costs, then yes. Suspiria still works because it keeps its questions messy — and because it refuses to let the neat answer win.