Calling it a masterpiece is an euphemism.

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 2001)

One of the few gems that would deserve more than the simple 10!It's the finest thriller of all times,but it's not only a thriller:it's everything:a psychological drama,a -monstrous- love film,a road movie-in its first part-,a psychopathology study,an update of those novels of the nineteenth century in which you take your life in your hands when you enter an isolated inn.All this and so much more.
Indeed so horrendous were the chances taken by Hitchcock on this movie that,with any lesser skill,the result could have been disastrous;think of it: the heroine disappears halfway through the movie ,leaving the spectator an orphan,or Tom Thumb in the threatening forest;one third of the movie features no dialogue at all;it was a shoestring budget because nobody but the Master and his close collaborators like Herrmann believed in such a project.
Bernard Herrmann outdoes himself for the absolutely perfect soundtrack.His work is so haunting,so mesmerizing that it was imitated to death,when it was not simply used as it was in countless plagiarisms.(DePalma's "Dressed to kill" is a good example)
Pushing his innovations forwards,the Master,after having used in "the rope",only 11 shots for the whole movie,reverses his strategy:70 in the 45 seconds shower scene.
Nothing of the plot should be revealed.Everything you would say would be a spoiler.I'm sure that I've already said too much of it.Just enjoy.