Psycho

A masterful piece of minimalist manipulation, and a pivotal film between the old and the new way of thrilling ’em – meaning that as shocking as it was originally, as easy is it today to imagine how it could be much more so. There’s something lovably old-fashioned about explaining the story after the show is over, though.

Whereas Hitchcock films usually construct highly artificial worlds, this one goes for gritty realism by those standards: here it is a time-consuming and even somewhat tedious job to clean up a murder, for want of an immediate threat or jump to the next action scene. In a way this has a more direct impact, but it’s also less interesting to rewatch.

Evaluating this film has become very hard, since every single one of the main attractions is so famous it’s impossible to look at it with fresh eyes, and the film as a whole seems to be little more than a supporting construct for them. For now, I don’t think there’s a lot going on beyond what is obviously going on. But it took me ten years to somewhat warm up to the other three big Hitchcock films, so this judgement isn’t final.