Here you’ll find an index of all of our articles and podcasts about the films of Luca Guadagnino.
Suspiria
Call Me by Your Name
A Bigger Splash
Suspiria (2018)
Listen to the Seventh Row podcast in which we talk about Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria starring Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson. We discuss the film as a horror film and draw parallels between its themes, tone, and style and those of Call Me by Your Name and A Bigger Splash.
Call Me by Your Name (2017)
Call Me by Your Name is the film Luca Guadagnino is best known for, and remains his crowning achievement so far. In adapting this story of first love, the Italian director perfected his precise and affective editing, as well as his talent for playing with his actors’ on-screen personas. In relying on Timothée Chalamet’s oddball charm and natural expressiveness, Call Me by Your Name essentially turned the young actor into a star.
The film also demonstrated Guadagnino’s interest in the duality and pull between surface and depth; between body and mind; between appearance and truth. Guadagnino made palpable the tension between Elio’s desire for Oliver, and his courage to physically act on it — but also the heartbreaking difference between Oliver’s public and private attitudes.
Chapter 1: Review of CMBYN
by Alex Heeney
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name is his sweetest, calmest, and loveliest film. It sneaks up on you.
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Chapter 2: Keeping a straight face: How CMBYN‘s queer characters get misread
by Brandon Nowalk
CMBYN is one of many same-sex romances to have its characters criticised as empty vessels in a fantasy world rid of homophobia. Homophobia is there, it just doesn’t appear. By contrast, evil does show its face in Suspiria.
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Chapter 3: Timothée Chalamet’s silent beauty
by Joanna Di Mattia
An essay on how Timothée Chalamet’s performance conveys the things that words cannot. Guadagnino makes the most out of Chalamet’s youthful and goofy charisma, letting his body reveal the feelings that Elio leaves unspoken.
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Chapter 4: Armie Hammer’s Oliver is more than an object of desire
by Orla Smith
The way Guadagnino plays with the on-screen personas of his actors in A Bigger Splash is perfected in his use of Armie Hammer. The actor’s performance weaponizes his beauty, allowing us to misread his character like Elio does.
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Chapter 5: Tricks with time
by Alex Heeney
An essay on how Luca Guadagnino uses framing and editing to expand and contract time, allowing us to experience it in the same way that Elio and Oliver do. He uses the same tools in Suspiria to purposefully disorient the viewer and create an uneasy atmosphere of chaos.
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Chapter 6: Our 11 favourite scenes from CMBYN
Our writers pick their favourite scenes from Call Me by Your Name and write about what makes each one of them so impactful.
Part 1
Part 2
A Bigger Splash (2016)
Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash is as joyful and sunny as it is dark and insidious — polar opposites which would come to animate all of his work, in various degrees. This is also the film that first showed the Italian director’s talent for precisely identifying the on-screen personas of his actors. His casting of Dakota Johnson — best known at the time for her role in the Fifty Shades franchise — as a mysterious Lolita was a stroke of genius. Her role in Suspiria two years later would similarly make perfect use of her ingenue airs and Mona Lisa smile.
Read our Special Issue on A Bigger Splash
Luca Guadagnino talks A Bigger Splash
By Ella Donald
Luca Guadagnino talks costumes, choreography, and generational conflict in A Bigger Splash. Like a good rock album, the film is sweaty, messy, carefree, and irresistible.
Read the interview
Not a girl, not (yet) a woman: Dakota Johnson and Hollywood femininity
By Dave Crewe
Luca Guadagnino remains the director to have best understood what makes Dakota Johnson so beguiling: she always seems to be hiding a secret. Throughout her career, she has used this to subvert conventional female stereotypes.
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The queer cult stardom of Tilda Swinton
By Kyle Turner
In A Bigger Splash, Tilda Swinton plays a Bowie-esque rock star. But she has used her androgynous physique to play with gender roles and expectations throughout her entire career.
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Matthias Schoenaerts and the art of not speaking
By Alex Heeney
Matthias Schoenaerts tends to communicate his characters’ inner lives through his physicality. A Bigger Splash allows him to also make use of his more peaceful, quiet side.
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Desire is a dangerous dance in A Bigger Splash
By Alex Heeney
Guadagnino’s interest in the gap between what we think we know, and reality, is at the core of A Bigger Splash: self-deceptions and blind spots have catastrophic consequences.
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