'Suspiria' had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival over the weekend, but the early reviews so far have been split in two not unlike the violent imagery in the movie itself.
While almost all reviews praised Guadagnino's vision and willingness to depart from the original directed by Dario Argento, the consensus seems to end pretty much at that. The Playlist praised the movie as "oddly hilarious, as well as deliciously confusing to the eye," and praised Guadagnino's splicing of horror with political and feminist commentary, whilst Time were much less complimentary and called it "bland, grisly, boring and silly."
The Guardian seemed to be a bit more middle-of-the-road in its review, calling it "a weirdly passionless film" and believed that "the spark of pure diabolical craziness of Argento has gone, together with his brash streak of black comedy, and in its place is something determinedly upscale and uppermiddlebrow, with indigestible new layers of historical meaning added."
The Wrap didn't think much of the cinematography either, adding that 'Suspiria' had "an unappealing visual sheen on an already dreary film," and described one dance sequence in the movie - not the horrific one everyone seems to be talking about - as "one of the screen’s most unintentionally hilarious pieces of choreography."
On the other end of the spectrum, both Vulture and IndieWire were full of praise for the movie and called it "a gorgeous, hideous, uncompromising film" and "more gross than it is creepy, and more elegiac than it is gross."
'Suspiria' doesn't open in Ireland until November 16th, and hopefully we'll have our review on it before then.