<p>Dario Argento’s genre classic is only the detonation point of Luca Guadagnino’s film. It keeps some elements of the plot, but redefines the historical context. Once again the location is Germany, but this time it is Berlin, where the still corrupt nation has failed to clear itself of those who had produced the horror of the Nazi era. In sharp contrast, the Red Army Faction fights for a new Germany with other means of terror. The Markos Tanz Company is the stage of a supernatural dimension in which a triad of ancestral divine presences control the events of the world, provided they feed their own power structure. Witchcraft is real when it is used to justify atrocities, like the wickedness of the Third Reich. Guadagnino reunites past and present, weaves together quotations, evocations, imagery, politics, art and psychoanalysis, in a gesture of formal rebellion of the cinematographic language, which is bloody, pulsating, unstoppable. The soundtrack composed by Thom Yorke (Radiohead) and the choreography by Damien Jalet propel the visionary force of the film. It multiplies in a linguistic dance that mentions the revolutionary role of the performative art of the 1970’s, which called into question power and identity by digesting violence through the experience of the body.</p>
