Too fanciful to be credible

Rating: 5/10 (20 September 2012)

I never was a Hitchcock fan and this review must be read in this light. I always thought that his films always created an intricacy of situations smelling of false that are suddenly disentangled in the end through an easy and doubtful solution. This movie is one more instance of this with a story full of gaps and snares, unreal and illogical in what concerns not only facts but also the psychological behaviour of the characters. In the end he concocts a rather dramatic final through the disclosure of the true story that was hidden behind the one that was being told us till then, in a rather superficial way This movie has not even at least the suspense or the thrill of some of his other movies like "Psycho" or "North by Northwest" for instance. It has several flaws and illogical or unexplained situations like for instance: a)- The plan to kill one's wife is too complicated involving a ghost story and the hiring of a double and a detective through a series of too artificial scenes; there is most surely a much easier and credible way to kill one's wife without being suspected of it. b)- It's unbelievable that when the detective meets for the first time after his friend's wife death the woman who lives in the hotel room that was supposedly used by the former, he couldn't recognize at once the woman he was in love with despite the different hair-do and make-up. c)- When the detective goes to that hotel for the first time trying to meet whom he then thought it was his friend's wife after having seen her through the window and it turns out that she isn't there after all, is the hotel lady manager also an accomplice in the plot when she says the other woman has not been there? And so on and so on. To declare this movie as the best movie ever made like a panel of distinguished critics recently did, is not only a huge falsehood but also an insult to tens of excellent films, hundreds of very good ones and even the thousands of those simply good.