[8.5/10] So much of modern moviemaking, and often modern horror along with it, rests of the big set piece. It’s in the DNA of the traditional scary movie to reach some crescendo of death or destruction or straight horror that will leave the audience shuddering in their shoes long after they’ve left the theater.
*Psycho* has those big time moments. The shower stabbing scene is rightfully iconic, a marriage of strings and steel and the sense of color in a black and white film that just exudes terror. The unflinching but artistic take on such a brutal act could, and arguably has, remained the lasting image of the film.
At the same time, the image of Arbogast, the private detective, being stabbed down the stairs is a sequence delivered with the same combination of startling horror and artistic flair, as he seems to glide down to the landing until crumpling into a heap. And the film’s last great gasp, in the form of the preserved remains of the real Mrs. Bates spun around nonsensically as the true killer is revealed and neutralized, is just as gripping a climax.
But coming to *Psycho* almost sixty years after it debuted, when its most iconic scenes and biggest twists were already known through cultural osmosis, is how scary, how foreboding, how unsettling this film when nothing particularly dramatic is happening.
Before a single blade is unsheathed, *Psycho* is a spectacularly tense film when it’s just the story of a young woman running away with a wad of cash and not much of a plan and a swirl of thoughts running through her brain. The suspense when Marion Crane catches her boss’s eye driving out of town, or tries to talk her way out of a confrontation with a passing police officer, or aims to switch out cars before the cop tracks her down, more than matches any of the grislier events later in the film.
That’s because the characters in the film are exceptionally well-motivated, which makes it easy for the viewer to feel what they feel, understand things from their perspective. A semi-tedious opening scene with Marion having a mid-afternoon dalliance with her boyfriend, Frank, sets up the sort of star-crossed love, the passion at odds with practical realities, that would drive her to leap unthinkingly at the chance to realize it which practically falls into her lap. We understand both why Marion does what she does, and how impulsive and fraught it is, making each interaction feel like the one that could send this house of cards tumbling down.
But beyond the script, so much of that spectacular, ominous sense that lingers over everything owes to the performances. Janet Leigh in particular is a live wire, ever the presence of someone who is calm enough on the surface, but utterly quaking behind the eyes. That sense of a person in over her head, bluffing through interaction after interaction in the hopes of finding providence and a clean getaway, comes through exquisitely.
She’s met and matched by her most significant scene partner, Anthony Perkins as the now iconic Norman Bates. One of the most impressive and bold things about *Psycho*, even decades later, is how well it manages to essentially hand the movie off between the two of them. Despite the years and years of spoilers that filter into anyone even vaguely tuned into film, there’s a shock at how early in the film Marion goes down after anchoring so much of the early portion of the film, and how seamlessly Hitchcock transitions between her doomed parable and the exploration of the sympathetic monster who causes her demise.
After her death, *Psycho* is driven by Marion’s absence, but also by Norman’s pathologies, his disquieting affect. Even before the big reveal, the sense of arrested development in him, of a strife-filled and repressed relationship between him and his mother, makes him instantly distinctive. Perkins brings such a presence to each scene he occupies, a nervous naturalism in a film where performances veer more toward the affected, that makes him so recognizable as someone outwardly okay, but radiating with something off-putting you can’t quite put your finger on. The reasons for his descent into murder and madness come through in a few scattered details offered, but mainly through Perkins’ delivery and demeanor, communicating all the audience needs to know about who and why Norman Bates is.
That’s why the film’s worst and least necessary scene is its final one, where a never-before-seen psychiatrist explains in tedious and useless detail exactly what led to Norman being this way, and laying bare the dense pop psychology that buttresses the subtext of the film. It is, frankly, a bizarre scene to modern eyes, one that seems to recount the movie’s major details and reveals just in case someone had been half-asleep for the main portion of the film and needed a recap before the credits rolled.
Still, the balance of the picture more than makes up for it. Composer Bernard Herrman’s score sets the mood and helps make internal emotions feel palpable to the audience even when the actors’ backs are to the camera. Even knowing the big twist, the creative camera work to obscure the real identity of the killer impresses. And Hitchock and Cinematographer John L. Russell conjure distinctive images like the sinking of a car into the muck, or the simple framings that preserve a suspenseful mood even when two people are just sitting in a room together.
That’s why *Psycho*’s best scene comes before its most famous murder, as it simply manages the handoff between one protagonist to the next. The most frightening moments in the film come when Marion and Norman are simply eating dinner together, waxing rhapsodic about life’s possibilities, about what fills the time and what allows us to seize it. It’s a scene of mutual realizations, of Marion hoping to erase the dangerous path she’s gone down to reach this point, and of Norman sublimating his combined want and censure and self-disgust at the prospect of this woman who simply wandered into his inn.
The combination of those two things, of two people who realize something about one another and themselves in the midst of a single slow-burning conversation, whose lives intersected by chance but directed one another’s futures, elevates everything that comes before and after. Like the crooked smile that Hitchcock and Perkins leave us with, it is not flashy, but so much scarier than the bits of horror that try to be so much bigger and yet feel so much lesser the quiet spaces of this unnerving original.
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