Did you know that there’s a third Suspiria movie? You could be forgiven for not. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if many people were unaware that Suspiria (1977) had a sequel to begin with, let alone a second one. Yes, I’m referring to the series, such as it is, as ‘Suspiria’ though in a more official sense the sequence is called the ‘Three Mothers’ trilogy. So, yeah, following on from Suspiria and Inferno (1980), we eventually got The Mother of Tears the better part of thirty years later, having failed to get the thing off the ground in the ‘80s.

It’s a bit rubbish. The problem is that it’s hard to expound on what makes it a bit rubbish, when it feels like a lot of the complaints could be levelled easily at the previous films as well. Hmm.

Plot wise, in Rome, while doing an exhumation on hallowed ground, they come across a casket apparently containing artefacts belonging to the eponymous mother. The priest in charge finds it pretty shady and evil so he seals it up good like… then sends it to the museum. As you do. The excuse is that the curator is an expert on occult artefacts or whatever. In lieu of the curator however, instead the heroine, Sarah (Asia Argento), and another employee decide to open the evil box without reading the covering letter, but when Sarah goes off to get her handy translation guide for the text on the treasures(?) therein, other employee soon finds herself being quite murdered. Our heroine, spotting her friend getting the killing of a life time, uses her initiative and runs away. Unfortunately, evil magic has locked her in. Fortunately, a ghostie (Daria Nicolodi) unlocks the door. The police turn up to be incompetent and not believe her bullshit, and so Sarah goes off with her lover, the aforementioned curator (Adam James), who does believe her bullshit. After some exposition to get the pair up to speed on the basics, the most conspicuous coven since The Craft turns up in the city and there are major outbreak of hysteria, anarchy and violence at the same time by an odd coincidence. To make life more difficult, curator-boy’s son has been abducted by cultists.

There’s your set up, I guess. It mightn’t be readily apparent from that, but it is missing a key component of the earlier films. Remember how Suspiria was set in and around a creepy school of dance that was a front for witches? Or how Inferno was set in and around a creepy apartment building that was a front for witches? Or how that other Suspiria that doesn’t bear all that much resemblance to the original overall was still set in and around a creepy school of dance that was a front for witches? Yeah, so… this is just like, Rome, I guess? The house that the queen-witch calls home eventually turns up in the last act, but the bulk of the film instead consists of Ms Argento being stalked around the city more generally while extras go nuts in the background.

Obviously, it isn’t fair to expect the film to be the same as the originals. It’s been thirty-ish years, after all. At the same time, it, for the most part, doesn’t remotely feel like the earlier films, instead just like a generic schlocky horror affair. Part of the appeal of the original Suspiria (and also Inferno) was its weird combination fever dream/fairy tale quality with its vivid Technicolor palette, its baroque production design, and its internally consistent but not wholly rational sense logic. Very little of that makes it into Mother of Tears. The vague is replaced with the entirely more solid, with a sealed evil which apparently spreads all through the world for reasons that aren’t particularly explained. The violence is more sadistic and excessive than ever, and despite being ostensibly about a witch, somehow the supernatural is seldom the explanation. Nope, the vast majority of events that happen are as a result of cultists, not magic. We can infer that the discord spreading throughout the city are as a result of Mother’s magical influence, but it doesn’t really change the fact that the witches are apparently doing all of the dirty work themselves now rather than summoning vaguely defined shadowy demonic beasties to do it in their stead. I suppose the coven seemingly has a goal this time (I guess it’s spreading evil, with the reason being because they’re evil), as opposed to whatever the hell they were up to previously (I think the idea was that they were using the students/tenants who find themselves in their home to preserve the Mothers’ lives, but I don’t remember it ever being stated what they were actually doing).

I ponder if some of this difference is down to Daria Nicolodi’s involvement or comparative lack thereof. Nicolodi is acknowledged as playing a role in the writing and development of Suspiria and Inferno, though only credited as such for the former. Despite appearing here (after a fashion anyway; her part consisting of spending what seems like fifteen minutes in front of green screen playing the ghost of Sarah’s mother* for a couple of minutes worth of footage), this thing’s script reportedly uses precisely none of the script co-written by her back when such a film would have been relevant; a fact she lays out quite plainly in interviews, funnily enough. This might explain the shift in tone to rather more generic feeling exploitation movie territory. Guess what, in addition to the upped levels of violence, there’s a gratuitous lesbian sex scene. Granted, it’s more gratuitous as in ‘unnecessary’ than ‘overlong’; we’re not talking Blue is the Warmest Colour here, with its sex scene equivalent of the fight scene from They Live. I was actually quite surprised by its brevity, though that does seem like it only further highlights how superfluous it is. And, yes, the lesbians are killed violently by the cultists pretty much immediately post-coitus, with a scene that seems like even the film itself noticed was sufficiently unnecessary that they had Mother turn up afterwards to question why the hell her followers are killing nearby people in needlessly elaborate ways rather than actually doing the mission they’ve been tasked with.

You know, it was that or just cut the damn scene.

In the last act, it seems they just suddenly remembered that it was supposed to be a Suspiria sequel and goes about trying to make it seem a bit more like it. Our heroine finally gets to the witch’s house, and from there this largely amounts to visual call backs; even having her take a cab there and framing it in the exact same way as the cab scene from the opening of Suspiria, complete with trying to make Asia Argento up to look a bit like Jessica Harper. The spooky house stuff is fine, I guess, though it largely seems to be going for the same Technicolor look of the earlier films rather than emulating the illogic impossibility of the earlier houses’ layouts; it’s just a big old abandoned house and the witches are hanging about in the catacombs underneath, perhaps the most obvious place for occultists to be, rather than, say, the crawl space or the master bedroom. It all rather points to Dario Argento not really understanding why the earlier films are fondly remembered and taking the most surface level approach. Perhaps it’s to be expected. Argento’s star had long been on the wane by this point; it’s hard to think of someone whose work had taken such a sudden sharp decline in critical reception, at least not without some other factor involved.

It retcons the ending to Suspiria to fit its new-fangled chosen one narrative, by the way, in what seems like the icing on the proverbial cake.



* Gettin’ Daria Nicolodi in to play Asia Argento’s mother, like they’re Diane Ladd and Laura Dern or summat!