Critics reviews

A ruthlessly compressed and expressive ideogram of cinema form and function, so complete and effective that it forced a reorganisation of whole continents in pop culture.

Who exactly is looking back at you when you stand in front of a mirror? And could this be the same kind of look when an actor is directed to look straight into the camera? Psycho (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock is full of those mirroring scenes and is packed with that sort of communication between the actor and the camera. The audience is kept busy to seperate these two ways of looking at … yourself.

Even if the infamous shower scene has lost its surprise and shock value (but watch it closely anyway), there's still a great deal to enjoy: a black and white pallet fine-tuned down to Vera Miles' bra; Hitchcock's bizarre infatuation with the Oedipus Complex; Bernard Herrmann's superb score. From the outside it's a film we've become accustomed to, but in a dark theater it becomes hauntingly unfamiliar again.

[The murder in the shower] is quite possibly the paramount narrative twist in the history of cinema.

The case for Hitchcock as a modern Conrad rests on this ruthless investigation of the heart of darkness, but the film is uniquely Hitchcockian in its positioning of the godlike mother figure.

A close inspection of "PSYCHO" indicates not only that the French have been right all along, but that Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America today. Besides making previous horror films look like variations of "Pollyanna," "Psycho" is overlaid with a richly symbolic commentary on the modern world as a public swamp in which human feelings and passions are flushed down the drain.