Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Suspiria
2018 · Luca Guadagnino · Suspiria on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how muted and cold the color palette stays. (light)
Mukdeeprom shoots almost entirely in ash, ochre, and gray, a deliberate inversion of the saturated Technicolor look most witch films reach for.
Payoff: The color is withholding something on purpose, which makes you watch for when it finally breaks. In the reading: affective colour. The reading calls this a colour-image: a palette that absorbs a scene's feeling, held back so its eventual return will register as an eruption.
Notice the sudden snap zooms and whip pans throughout. (camera)
The camera recalls 1970s genre cinema with jolting push-ins and quick pans, and mirrors recur constantly in the dance studio as a visual motif.
Payoff: The restless camera keeps the whole film feeling one beat away from losing control.
Watch the choreography move like it has a purpose beyond dance. (staging)
Damien Jalet's movement, especially the recurring piece performed in blood-red rope costuming, is built to look functional rather than merely expressive or decorative.
Payoff: The dancing looks like it is doing something to someone, not just expressing a feeling.
Listen for radio bulletins about kidnappings interrupting quiet scenes. (sound)
News of the RAF kidnappings and hijacking drifts constantly into the academy through radios, keeping 1977 Berlin's crisis present even in the most domestic moments.
Payoff: The outside world never actually leaves the building, even when nobody mentions it.
Watch Tilda Swinton's face stay imperious no matter what happens. (performance)
Swinton plays Madame Blanc with commanding, controlled authority throughout, a stillness that gives the company's rehearsals an undertone of real power.
Payoff: Her calm makes the dance company feel like it answers to her alone.
Once you have seen it
Watch Susie's audition cut against Olga trapped in the mirrored room. (cutting)
Walter Fasano intercuts every leap of Susie's dance with Olga's body breaking in a locked room elsewhere, the two women never sharing a single frame.
Payoff: The violence happens entirely in the cut, not in anything either woman is shown doing to the other. In the reading: montage-dialectical-soviet. The reading calls this a dialectical cut: two shots colliding so a third thing, the sorcery, appears only in the gap between them.
Watch the coven hold a vote like any ordinary committee. (structure)
The witches argue procedure, form factions, and settle disputes by ballot, staged as a functioning institution rather than as gothic caricature or shadowy cult.
Payoff: This coven is a small nation building itself, inside a divided city with no nation of its own to trust. In the reading: the people are missing. The reading calls this a people is missing: a community forced to invent and govern itself because no outside one exists for it.
Watch how the epilogue shifts tone after everything that happened. (structure)
The final movement turns unexpectedly gentle and mournful, granting Klemperer a release from grief instead of continuing the film's earlier violence.
Payoff: The film ends on mercy, and leaves you unsure whether that mercy is a gift or a warning.
Carry this in: Watch how little red the film allows itself until very near the end.