So — you went and saw Suspiria.
Maybe you even sat through the whole thing!
This two-and-a-half hour journey is definitely not the sort of moviegoing experience that
goes down well for everybody.
We're sure you have a few questions.
Around Suspiria's midpoint, Madame Blanc, the Markos Dance Company's top instructor,
begins to develop a new dance concept centering around the theme of rebirth.
By then, we're well aware that the company is secretly a front for an ancient coven of
witches, who seem to be violently sacrificing young dancers for nefarious reasons.
While the details of Blanc's plan aren't made totally explicit, her proposal heavily implies
that the dance will be used to resurrect the coven's ailing leader, the witch called Mother
Markos.
It also seems like the feat will require a human sacrifice.
It’s implied that the coven tried the ritual before with the dancer Patricia, played by
Chloe Grace Moretz but something about the ceremony went wrong, leaving Markos near death
and Patricia's whereabouts unknown.
When audiences first meet Susie Bannion, played by Dakota Johnson, she evokes a lot of sympathy.
Her sheltered upbringing and self-taught dance talents serve to make her a protagonist we
can root for, and we spend most of the movie scared about what's going to happen to her.
The witches of the coven clearly regard her as a sacrifice in the making, all but licking
their teeth at the idea of offering her up as part of some deadly ritual.
Of course, by the time we get to the end of the movie… well, joke's on them, right?
Come to find out, Susie is actually a reborn ancient witch by the name of Mother Suspiriorum,
one of the oldest witches in existence, who was central to the founding of the occult
company.
As Susie's staunchly-religious birth mother later claims while on her death bed, Susie
is not a daughter that she loves, but instead her greatest sin.
It's a devastatingly mean thing to say about one's child, but she's also kind of right.
By the end of the movie, Susie is no babe in the woods, but instead a force of ageless
power who is finally returning to life to lead a league of witches — even if she's
not entirely aware of her identity when the movie begins.
While Patricia resisted the coven, Susie embraces it, going from a newcomer to a leader in the
company with remarkable speed.
But the mystery of what happened to Susie's predecessor looms over the academy, with Patricia's
disappearance being investigated by fellow student Sara as the movie revs up toward a
bloody climax.
Minutes before a public dance performance, Sara discovers that Patricia didn't disappear
from the academy at all.
Instead, she's trapped inside it, somehow still alive along with other victims of the
witches, including Olga the woman who was literally torn apart by Susie's dancing.
While the victims are all still alive, their bodies are rotted and mangled.
Thanks to some witchcraft, they are trapped in a state of deathless suffering a devastating
fate which soon befalls Sara as well.
The innocent dancers of the Markos company aren't the only people being manipulated into
involvement in the witches' ritual.
They also target Dr. Jozef Klemperer, Patricia’s elderly therapist, plotting to bring him into
their rebirth ritual as an unwilling witness.
As we learn throughout the movie, the somber therapist is haunted by the disappearance
of his wife Anke, who vanished during World War II.
Klemperer has spent decades trying to move on from this traumatic separation which makes
it all the more shocking when she appears to him, seemingly back from the dead, at his
country home outside of Berlin.
In an intriguing twist, she's played by actress Jessica Harper, who played the role of Suzy
in the original Suspiria.
Their reunion is so emotional that you almost don't notice that Anke is walking Klemperer
from the countryside back into West Berlin, right up to the doors of the Markos academy.
As Klemperer realizes where his wife has led him, she is suddenly revealed to be a cruel
illusion of the witches, leading him into a trap.
In the movie's final act, the characters all descend on a hidden chamber inside the academy,
where the rebirthing ritual for Mother Markos is set to take place.
The company's students are there in a trance, dancing and forming a sort of human altar
with their bodies.
Klemperer's there among the witches as a captive witness, and so is the guest of honor Mother
Markos herself, who appears in all her hideous glory for the first time.
Since her last attempt at reincarnation, Markos has been described as being on death’s door.
Now we can see why it looks as though she has become partially fused with another body,
with extra malformed limbs jutting impossibly from bulbous form.
But soon, it seems, she will be reborn in a new body Susie's.
As Susie enters the room to begin the ritual, Markos and her allies believe the time for
reincarnation has finally arrived.
But while Susie is all confidence, Blanc is uneasy, scared even.
Something feels wrong to her.
Susie isn't acting like the sheltered girl we thought we knew — she's acting more like
she runs the place, putting Blanc on edge.
Blanc tries to stop the ritual but fails when Markos attacks her, nearly decapitating her
with telepathic magic, spraying blood everywhere.
With Blanc sidelined, it seems like Markos’ resurrection is imminent.
But it turns out that the ceremony isn't for her rebirth at all.
Instead, the ritual is the culmination of a power play from an even stronger witch that’s
been brewing in the background the whole film.
Tearing her flesh open, Susie reveals herself to be none other than the revived Mother Suspiriorum
— the millennia-old entity who was a founding member of the witches' occult order.
Susie — or now Suspiriorum — begins to unleash bloody hell on Markos and her allies
in the coven, who dared to seize power in her place.
She doesn't do it alone — instead, she summons the living embodiment of Death itself to stroll
around the room making her enemy's heads explode.
It's pretty trippy.
After Markos and her followers are dispatched, the rest of the movie is essentially Susie's
victory lap.
She spares the lives of the dancers, as well as the witches who weren't loyal to Mother
Markos, and also allows Patricia, Sara, and Olga to finally die, their ruined bodies collapsing
to the ground in an act of motherly mercy.
It's a completely different take on the original Suspiria's story, and if the movie's cryptic
post-credits scene is to be believed, the story might just be getting started.
The original Suspiria, directed by Dario Argento , had two sequels: Inferno and The Mother
of Tears, each focusing on a different one of the powerful witches known as the Three
Mothers.
Is it possible that the remake director Luca Guadagnino is explicitly teasing sequels in
the vein of Argento's follow-ups?
While nothing's been announced yet, it is possible.
But don't worry too much about decoding that cryptic last shot: according to screenwriter
David Kajganich, the brief scene of Susie standing in the cold making vague gestures
wasn't even scripted.
Most likely, the scene is just open to interpretation, meant to send viewers out of the theater thinking,
talking, and weighing the ending's implications, with a heavy sigh.