I appreciate films that are loudly, brashly anti-fascist but I also appreciate films where the hated of fascism boils underneath the surface, no less energetic and furious for being cloaked in a layer of metaphor. This is textually a film about vanquishing an old guard built on lies—vanquishing them with violence, explicitly and pointedly with violence. Doctor Klemperer draws the connection most explicitly between the coven as a religion and the Third Reich, but we also see this in the targeting of Patricia the militant leftist and Klemperer the Holocaust survivor. Across all this is painted the omnipresent background of the Rote Armee Fraktion's ultimately failed campaign to purge Nazis from the upper ranks of German society. Guadagnino's Suspiria mourns their loss by juxtaposing it with Mother Suspiriorum's successful destruction of the parasitic faction of the coven, those who are content to merely survive and enjoy their power at the expense of the students who could just as easily become their sisters.

On the opposite end stands Blanc, who neither idolizes nor repudiates power but sees it as necessary to exert her will upon the world. She does so through dance, which visually and thematically combines both art and violence. Violence is a thread through the film, in its effects on people who experience it (Olga, Klemperer) and who perform it (Markos, Susie). But it's never simplistic: the audience is challenged to understand, as Blanc does, that convictions (artistic or moral, the film recognizes no distinction between the two) must be accompanied by action, and action against a violent state of being must itself be violent to be of any use.

There are hints here and there that the coven is populated with lesbians, which suggests in turn that the alluded-to difficulty it faced in the 40s was due to Nazi oppression not just of women but of queers. From this angle, this is also a film about assimilation. Once the threat to them has passed, the Markosites are content to be lords of their own little fiefdom. Suspiriorum, on the other hand, takes pity on those the coven has tortured, and has a particularly heartwrenching moment of solidarity with Klemperer, who also has his love destroyed by the Nazis. It's no coincidence as well that the RAF news we hear all centers around the Palestinian solidarity action. We even see the word itself scrawled on banners hung around West Berlin. But even solidarity is complicated in the same way violence is: Mother Suspiriorum has no room for solidarity with those who have already used their power for selfish and cruel ends.

Needless to say, this film is categorically better than the original. It has a cogent plot and pointed, politically-mature themes where the 1977 film has little more than a sequence of barely-connected imagery. What's more, it also does a better job at impressionistic collages of imagery and emotion. Its use of dance as a mode of storytelling is particularly masterful, and from a craft perspective shows a tremendous amount of shared trust between Guadagnino and his collaborators.

I even think the color palette works here. I'm usually a fan of saturated colors, and that was one of my favorite parts of the original, but especially in contrast the grays and browns and beiges make a point: we are no longer in technicolor Freiburg. We are in divided West Berlin and we are grappling directly with the cold war. We see the colors of the Wall and the city, and the only color comes from the reds of dance and blood that must be carved out of the world by force.