Disembodied

Rating: 7/10 (17 April 2006)

Hitchcock declares up front that we're going to be on the edge of our seats while he has us captive. The music is shrill, obsessive.
We float in through the window on two lovers breaking up. A tailing police cruiser drifts out of the rear glass while we watch the girl watching her mirror. The camera floats out of the girl's dead eye, pulls back on her face frozen in fear, it swings around, pulls in on the newspaper, then swings away to the haunted madhouse on the hill. It levitates up the staircase, focuses on the 'conversation' in the next room, backs away and upwards and views the hallway straight down, all in one movement...a more impressive minute than the entire contents of many other movies.
Required film school viewing, absolutely. But also for us more casual viewers, this is a key movie we all need for understanding where visual vocabularies come from.
The later borrowings from this are uncountable. The most literal borrowing from the shower scene is in the "Raging Bull" Lamotta/Robinson bout, matching the cuts from angle to angle and in the same rhythm.
Brilliant vision and music, medium story and acting, though Perkins made every tic and stutter count.