Redheads and Dancing Legs in Suspiria and The Red Shoes

Redheads and Dancing Legs in Suspiria and The Red Shoes

For film critic and essayist Ariana Martinez, cinema begins with a sense of the unknown. Following red hair across films, from witches in Berlin to ballerinas in Technicolor to queer dancers in Tbilisi, Martinez traces a thread of obsession, movement and identity that refuses to stay hidden.

The blonde has glamour and aloofness, the brunette oscillates between exoticism and nerdiness, and the redhead possesses mystery, a more subdued and mystifying allure. Hair colour, so often a point of pride, fear, or indifference, is part of cinema’s visual language and its styles and shades are many. But the redhead, at least in dance films, is never just “fiery.” Auburn tones carry their own distinct highlights, signalling change, seduction or unraveling.

Last month I rewatched Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), his reimagining of Dario Argento’s 1977 cult horror about an American ballet student who discovers her Berlin academy is run by witches. In the opening sequence, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) descends into the U-Bahn, a long wool scarf wrapped around her fiery hair. I hit pause and glance at the mirror beside me: I, too, have red hair. Not quite Susie’s shade - more copper than crimson - but my reflection still makes me consider if some subconscious strand had led me here, preparing me for this uncanny double-take.



SUSPIRIA (2018) dir. Luca Guadagnino

In Suspiria, Susie’s long red locks reveal the colour’s magnetism. A shy newcomer, she arrives in Berlin to audition for the Helena Markos Dance Company, her hair at first entwined within her scarf or bound in a bun. While she stretches in her grey sweats, again her hair remains hidden. But as Susie begins to writhe to the rhythm in her head, a strand escapes, swaying as she moves. The unravelling begins.

The full breadth of Susie’s hair emerges gradually: first in the privacy of her room, glimpsed intimately only by Sara (Mia Goth), another dancer with whom she has a close bond; then in her meeting with lead instructor Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), where her unbraided hair is released, cascading around her shoulders. Here she is tasked with embodying the company’s most demanding role, and she accepts. From that moment, her hair is never bound again, a signal of her rising prominence within the academy. But on the day of the performance, it is abruptly cut to her shoulders. The gesture is unceremonious, yet heavy with meaning: a physical manifestation of Susie’s allegiance to the coven and a severing from the relationships of her past, be that Sara, or her Mennonite upbringing.



THE RED SHOES (1948) dir. Powell & Pressburger
Watching Susie, one is reminded of another dazzling auburn dancer: Moira Shearer’s Victoria (Vicky) Page in The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948). Bathed in Technicolor, burnished in red from crown to pointe, Vicky is consumed by the colour as she performs the ballet of the same name - a tale of a girl cursed to dance herself to death. Her own life mirrors the story. Both Vicky and Suspiria’s Susie are cloaked in red, but where the latter’s trajectory is an ascension, like a flame gathering strength, Vicky flickers toward extinction.

Vicky’s hair, unlike Susie’s, carries a buoyant polish: curled, puffed, consistently rolled and pinned. Unlike Susie, whose loosened hair signals an ecstatic loss of control, Vicky must remain composed and proper. In one of the ballet’s most iconic shots, she presses her hands to her temples, pushing her hair back, her fiery halo backlit. The image radiates ferocity, but it is a façade. Though her success as a dancer grows, she is repeatedly warned that love will sabotage her peak. When she chooses romance over the company, she cannot abandon dance either. Trapped between art and love, unable to fully inhabit either, Vicky leaps to her death - the theatricality of her costume blurring the boundary between stage and life, performance and self.

For these crimson heroines, dance cannot be disentangled from the colour that defines them, a colour that embodies both ecstasy and ruin. But what about the dancing redheaded man? Is he similarly burdened?

In Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced (2019), auburn-haired Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) is already part of the National Georgian Ensemble, but like Susie he must prove himself worthy of the main company. Tradition and masculinity weigh heavily on him until Irakli, a new dancer, awakens both rivalry and desire. As with Vicky, romance and dance appear irreconcilable, yet here the conflict is charged with queerness and defiance.

AND THEN WE DANCED (2019) dir. Levan Akin
The morning after they sleep together, Merab and Irakli dance in the daylight, their movements freer than before. Later, bathed in warm natural light, Merab performs privately for Irakli. Until now, his hair has been matted flat with sweat, a marker of discipline and strain. But as he faces Irakli, he slips on a platinum blonde wig - a gesture of play, transformation, fantasy. Standing on a bed, cigarette in hand, he gazes down at his lover, the wig shading his eyes as he reaches toward a love he knows cannot last. The blonde is a fleeting mask; the auburn remains his truth.

Across these films, red hair signals transgression, a colour restless with possibility. Susie finds power in divine, macabre femininity; Vicky succumbs to a doomed and constraining one; Merab channels a rebellious, queer variation. Auburn highlights how the strange and the nameless can reconfigure a life - sometimes toward liberation, sometimes toward destruction. The colour does not resolve, but rather flickers, transforming dancers into figures of both allure and danger.

Ariana Martinez is a freelance film critic and culture writer. Instagram @arianamartinezx
Back to blog