Dakota Johnson stuns as a dancer in new movie thriller Suspiria

DAKOTA Johnson, the 29-year-old daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, is making a habit out of upsetting industry expectations. Her new movie Suspiria is proof of that.

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SUSPIRIA

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Starring: Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Chloe Grace Moretz

Rating: MA15+

Running time: 152 minutes

Verdict: Discombobulating art house horror (Three-and-a-half stars)

UNDERESTIMATE Dakota Johnson at your peril.

The 29-year-old daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson is making a habit out of upsetting industry expectations.

First, she survived the eroticised ingenue role of Anastasia Steele in the film adaptation of E.L. James’ bodice-ripping Fifty Shades trilogy with her reputation largely intact.

Now, Johnson busts out of that potboiling pigeonhole with a character that appears to have walked straight out of some twisted folk tale.

Dakota Johnson as dancer Susie Bannion in Suspiria.

It’s unclear exactly who casts the spell in this strange and unnatural film, which pays homage to Italian director Dario Argento’s 1977 cult horror classic.

I’d plump for some kind of unholy union between Johnson, director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) and the always mesmerising Tilda Swinton (all of whom last collaborated on the art house hit A Bigger Splash).

What’s keenly apparent is the film’s insidious power to disturb moviegoers’ nervous systems — the images reverberate for days after the credits have rolled.

Suspiria, inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s 1845 essay Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs From The Depths), tells the story of Susie Bannion (Johnson), a dancer from a Mennonite community in Ohio, who travels to Berlin in the 1970s to audition for a leading dance company.

Dakota Johnson stands out in her new role. Picture: Courtesy of Amazon Studios

The company’s director and choreographer, Madame Blanc (Swinton), is fascinated by Bannion’s natural talent, and soon adopts the young dancer as her protege.

But the Markos Dance Academy is not what it seems — as the opening sequence involving a psychotic former student (Chloe Grace Moretz) and an ancient Freudian psychologist suggests.

Josef Klemperer, played by Swinton, unrecognisable underneath layers of wrinkly prosthetic make-up, is an appealing off-key character with a nice throwaway line about influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

The coven of washerwoman witches whose cabaret cackles emanate from the academy’s interior common room are fascinatingly grotesque.

The Markos Dance Studio is not what it seems. Picture: Sandro Kopp/Amazon Studios

Standout sequences include Bannion’s primal “puppet” dance during which she unwittingly causes a student in a secret mirrored room beneath her to twist and contort her limbs and organs in an animated interpretation of a Francis Bacon painting and the visceral, no-holds-barred underworld finale

Suspiria is a far from flawless adaptation — the twists, turns and subplots involving Nazis, the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Group and feminist supremacists lead us pretty much up the garden path.

But the filmmakers’ cinematic incantation is so powerful, such quibbles seem almost irrelevant.

Having seduced moviegoers into their strange, supernatural world, they successfully mesmerise us for the next two and a half hours.

* Now showing

Originally published as Dakota Johnson stuns as a dancer in new movie thriller Suspiria