Subtlety is not one of Luca Guadagnino’s virtues. The 52-year-old Italian director thrives on excess, on sequences that feel like they could suddenly spin out of control. When Ralph Fiennes’s platinum-plated record producer vamps impulsively to the Rolling Stones in 2015’s A Bigger Splash, it’s a display that feels equally true to the character’s boozy exhibitionism and the director’s narcissistic sense of showmanship; they’re both vibrating on the same ecstatic frequency, in search of emotional rescue. After more or less perfecting his florid, open-hearted style in Call Me by Your Name—a movie drenched in bittersweet sensations of love and loss, whose much-memed money shots still hold up—Guadagnino has lately cross-bred his instinct for melodrama with an unlikely (and only semi-convincing) stint as a kind of festival-circuit artsploitation specialist. In the misbegotten giallo remake Suspiria and the Twilight-adjacent YA romance Bones and All, the director drained his usually colorful palette and began treating his characters with the same tough love as a meat tenderizer; the acres of fetishistically splintered flesh on display teased a Cronenbergian mean streak. Such shock tactics were ultimately lacking, however. For all their lubricious gore (and, in the case of Suspiria, pretentious pedigree), these films ultimately felt more like designer provocations than genuine, dangerous acts of multiplex transgression.
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