When are you seeing 'Suspiria' (2018)?

An over-cut, thematic mess of a film with admirable ambitions to be an historical horror epic. Thom Yorke and his otherworldly soundtrack deserved much better, especially as it often feels that the filmmakers forget that they have it at their disposal. There's a lot to like in Suspiria, from the music to the choreography, to its enthralling scope and its ultimately subversive take on the female horror lead. Guadagnino spends quite a bit of time stalling, though, and for a film so constantly vapid with such blank-slate characters, the buildup is hardly worth it. It's ripe with sociopolitical window dressing, a color palette so muted that it must be putting an active effort into distancing itself from Argento, and only a vague sense of atmospheric dread that struggles to build into something more. Even the much-lauded makeup effects are rather cartoonish, and the jury's still out on whether or not that was the intent. It's successful only in sporadic spikes as a horror film, more or less peaking comparatively early-on with the already-infamous contortion scene, admittedly effective more because of the creativity of the concept than because of how it's presented. Really, much of the horror fails because of how explicit it makes the source of the terror, and even how early it does so. Any sense of mystery has evaporated within the first forty-five minutes of the film, and after that there's hardly any palpable eeriness to get under the skin. There are certainly some moments of mesmerizing imagery and viscerally gut-wrenching gore and physicality further down the line, but the means to get to those ends are just really problematic. I don't really want to say I disliked it because it always impresses me when something this ambitious and ballsy gets made, and distributed by a major studio no less -- but, uh, let's just say I wasn't exactly in-synch with its motions.

I may try to watch this again in the future when it comes to Prime, I may not. I feel like there's a chance I may like this more on a repeat viewing, but for now, this doesn't do it for me.