So I had heard bad things about this, mostly of the “why did they bother making this, it doesn’t live up to the original” variety — which, okay, sure, it does in fact seem like you shouldn’t do a remake unless you can do something better than the original.

But after seeing it, while I don’t think this is better than the original, I think it’s absolutely a movie that justifies its existence. Really, it’s so different from the original that I think the biggest mistake they made was even calling it Suspiria. If they’d called it something else, and then been like “inspired by Suspiria” or called it an homage to Suspiria in press interviews or whatever, then everyone could have taken this movie for what it is, and also felt smart for seeing the many ways in which it’s like Argento’s classic giallo.

Which, I mean, there are a lot of ways: The movie still is a story about an American girl come to a Berlin dance academy in the ’70s, where a student has just fled in mysterious circumstances, and where it seems like there’s some weird shit going on. There are other beats that also echo. But beyond that, it’s pretty much its own movie, with a plot that goes in different directions and cares about different things.

Guadagnino, the director of this version, plays up the setting a bit more — I had never really thought about the fact that Berlin in 1977 was still a divided Cold War city, nor about all the terrorist activity of the Baader-Meinhof Group at that time, but here news clips and newspapers are thrown in as kind of background setting details that simultaneously make it feel a bit more like a period piece (movies set in contemporary times never bother to throw in the headlines of the day) but also a bit more grounded in a particular place and time.

He also makes the supernatural goings-on considerably more explicable. I wouldn’t say this is a movie where everything is spoon-fed to you, but compared to the absolute logic-defying incomprehensibility of Argento’s version, this is a marvel of narrative clarity. (To kind of drive home how uncertain I am about Argento’s plot: I said above that this movie goes in different directions, and I believe that to be true; but if you told me I was wrong, I wouldn’t be that comfortable arguing with you despite having seen it multiple times.)

Taken as a “remake” of Argento’s, as an attempt to improve it or update it, I think it’s obviously a failure; Argento’s movie is so perfectly what it is that no remake is necessary or desirable. But taken as a movie on its own terms, this is solid, stylish (in different ways from Argento’s movie, but still clearly very stylized), and worth watching for fans of the original who want to see a variation on a theme. (But if you’re only going to watch one… probably watch the old one, just for the cultural literacy.)