A classic essential cinema!

Rating: 10/10 (14 October 2005)

"Psycho" is the most astounding, daring, and successful scary film ever made... Hitchcock uses pure cinema to arouse audience emotions...
For the first forty minutes he cautiously builds up sympathy and audience identification with a troubled fugitive, a young estate secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) who wants to marry Sam Loomis (John Gavin) but neither can afford it... Entrusted, by a wealthy customer, with $40,000 to put in a safe deposit box in a bank, she succumbs to temptation and steals the money in order to start a new life with her lover... So the motive is love!
We begin to feel the tension when she's spotted  leaving Phoenix, Arizona  by her boss who thinks she remains in bed with a headache... Then, when she pulls off the highway to take a nap and is awaken by a suspicious patrolman  in disturbing dark glasses  who trails her... Hitchcock's trademark paranoia about the police is here at his best...
Frightened and tired by a violent rainstorm, she stops at Bates Motel and has a small talk with a twitchy cordial motel keeper Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins-in an outstanding performance), an attractive shy young man who seems uneasy around her and can't even bring himself to pronounce the world bathroom...
The movie turns dark and claustrophobic when she overheard the voice of Norman's mother speaking sharply with her son, and after she learns Norman's strong devotion to his irritable mother...
Alone in the room, she strips to shower Safe and relaxing, the hot air rises as the water cascades over her Suddenly she turns at a sound, her eyes dilate with horror and her repeated screams rend the air as a hand from nowhere holding a long knife plunges it repeatedly into her body Her blood, mingling with the water, flushes down the drain in one of the most terrifying images of modern cinema
No one who saw the film will forget the shock effect of that scene... Not only because of its terrifying realism, with the blood gushing and swirling on the shower floor; but also because Leigh was a sympathetic and star figure Although she had stolen, we felt involved with her (as we were involved with Marnie); we wanted her to get away; and here, with two-thirds of the film still to got we watched helplessly as the life and the beauty and the hopes were butchered out of her
The movie is only off one third when Hitchcock's spiral close-up of her unmoving eyeball reveals the nightmare... But the movie does really begin after her murder because once she is killed, we never stop thinking about her...
With Marion Crane gone, our attention is shift to the sensitive Norman with a passion for birds and mother... They are very close and he guards her jealousy...
As three people began to investigate, our sympathies were subtly maneuvered to the good-looking young man who, it seemed, must try to protect a homicidal mother We see him distraught, cleaning up and disposing of Marion's car, with her body and cash, into a swamp...
We have no reason to think that he himself have done the dirty work... So could his crippled old mother be the vicious murderer? Or do we have some other reason to suspect that Norman's abusive mother does not exist? We heard the old woman talking constantly to him and we see Norman carrying her to the cellar... Or is it another Hitchcock's trick? But the knife comes out again striking and killing... The high angle shot shows perfectly her mad menacing rush from her bedroom...
Hitchcock's version is definitive, a terrifying insinuating thriller with only two sudden and vicious murders... A classic essential cinema with his rich, vivid and effective imagery in the use of light and shadow; his voyeurism when Perkins spies on Leigh in a black bra (The first time he shows a lady disrobed); his 'metaphysical vertigo' in the overhead shot as Norman drags his mother down to the cellar...