A master-class in screen suspense.

Rating: 10/10 (31 March 2008)

Arguably the most legendary film of all time, Psycho is a disorientating and thoroughly absorbing thriller from Alfred Hitchcock. The film has, to some extent, been hurt by years of imitation and variation. but taken strictly on its own terms it is one of the finest examples of a director manipulating his audience into the exact state of mind that he wants them.
In Phoenix, Arizona, bored real-estate secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is having an affair with a man called Sam Loomis (John Gavin) but fears the relationship will never work out because he is reluctant to leave his wife. She is entrusted by her boss to take $40,000 to a deposit box in the local bank, but Marion senses an opportunity to carve a better life for herself and takes off with the money. She travels towards San Francisco, but en route finds herself in a ferocious thunderstorm. Marion checks into a motel for the night  the seemingly innocuous Bates Motel. Here she is befriended by the shy and nervous proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who lives in a huge, run-down house overlooking the motel shacks and seems to be very much under the constant scrutiny of his domineering mother. Later that night, while taking a shower, Marion is brutally murdered by a shadowy knife-wielding killer. Norman blames the crime on his mother and in a state of distress hides the body. Later, Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) and Sam, aided by private eye Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam), start searching for the missing woman. The trail leads eventually to Bates Motel, and an unexpected discovery concerning the truth about Norman's mother.
Psycho is an example of pure cinema  Hitchcock doesn't merely follow a singular narrative, but employs every trick in the book (plus a few new ones invented specifically for the film) to extract maximum suspense. For forty minutes or so, the film seems to be a film about a confused woman running away with some money that isn't hers. But the brutal murder - of what we perceive to be the main character - is a masterstroke of audience disorientation. Once the film's biggest star, and the character we have up to that point followed, has been killed how can we feel safe and secure about anything that is to come? The shower scene itself is incredibly powerful  Hitchcock turns us, the audience, into voyeurs. It's hard to believe that there isn't a single shot of the knife actually making contact with Marion's body  via brilliant editing and sound effects we are actually convinced that we have seen all that happen, but most of the horror exists in the viewer's mind. Bernard Herrman's strings-only score is quite marvellous and adds additional suspense to an already thrilling film. And the acting is simply superb, with Perkins the obvious stand-out as the complex and enigmatic Norman Bates. The film has been written about, celebrated and analyzed so much that some of its novelty has been slightly diminished.. but for anyone who has the slightest interest in the mechanics of a "real" thriller, this is the ultimate experience.