SUSPIRIA (1976) ** Dario Argento spends the first ten minutes demonstrating that no one can run a series of incredible shots as he can: sound and motion, colour and contour, shadow and form, suspicion and transgression and innocence and some forlorn hope of anything else, of anything here… He then rests on his laurels, in that regard, until the closing minutes, satisfying himself with interesting sets adorned with trinkets, and setting forth various minor observations on a diluted theme of dominance and submission and other-worldliness. For all the corpses building up, it actually gets pretty dull. The Goblin music somehow manages to remain both appropriate and not laughable, which is a phenomenal achievement, and there's no way to actually attain the apparently possible boredom whilst imbibing of Argento's visual cocktail, but…and not just compared to the opening scenes, it just doesn't feel like that much is going on. Maybe it's cinema's fault generally, we now demand to empathize with a character before sharing its pain and motivation, and there's not a character in sight. Witches just aren't astonishing, in and of themselves, at this point in the cultural narrative, if they ever were. I can see how someone would think it's a masterpiece, probably an exceptional art student suffering mild attention disorder. That having been said, if I was a film student I'd probably watch the opening ten minutes at least thirty times over the next few days.
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