Avis des critiques

Having emerged from an aborted film about psychoanalysis that Powell and Marks had been working on, during the writing of which Marks was able to "study" the director, Peeping Tom would offer a glimpse into the mind of Powell himself... Michael Powell was always out of step with the cinema of his own country, and often ahead of his time.

Peeping Tom is surprisingly prescient — filmically and culturally. It is the urtext of the Joker style of sympathetic murderers, and also an anticipatory study of incel culture. Peeping Tom may have prematurely ended Powell’s career, but its influence is remarkable.

Peeping Tom trades in matters of trauma, toxic masculinity and incel dysfunction that are de rigueur in horror today, which isn’t to say it feels dated or passé. You freeze and hold your breath with the film as it pulls back the curtain on realities nobody really wanted to admit or address in the cinema on a Saturday night; you fear not just for the women on screen, but for your fellow viewers, then and now.

[T]his was the first film that asked movie watchers to stare into their own murder mirrors and interrogate the pleasures gained from looking. It suggested that there is something fundamentally creepy about sitting in the dark and consuming unseen the captured images of pretty people spread out before us, for our delectation. Powell knew it. Scorsese knows it. The film remains dangerous, and brilliant, because of it.

The way Powell implicates the viewers’ own voyeurism makes it a uniquely disturbing and provocative experience.

The formal potency of Peeping Tom represents one of Powell's most daring rebukes, even if it took his career down with it. The movie will ask dangerous questions about its own system but refuse to answer them. It will elevate sleazy, sometimes preposterous pulp material to art by dragging respectability towards the gutter. It will recognize that some things are too sacred, too private, or too dangerous to have a camera record them. And then it will record them anyway.

[Peeping Tom] might be considered the grandfather to the omnipresent found footage horror genre and it inspired Jim McBride's classic, scathingly self-reflexive David Holzman's Diary—and virtually every self-critical documentary since. The film remains relevant today not simply because of its vast influence, but because of the fundamental truth Powell expresses about the dark heart of cinema.

[I]f anything deserves the “dark masterpiece” tag, this does: a brilliant satirical insight into the neurotic, pornographic element in the act of filming, more relevant than ever in the age of reality television and CCTV.

Quite unlike anything else in British cinema before or since, Powell’s garish, deliciously perverse proto-slasher movie stands up at least as well as its better-known trans-Atlantic cousin Psycho, released around the same time.

Peeping Tom is a seamless melding of art and exploitation; the sexually perverted sibling of Fellini’s 8½ (1963).

Powell judiciously treads this fine line, while manipulating an unsettling atmosphere with roving camera work that exploits Otto Heller's shadowy cinematography. The end effect is memorable, and among other serial killer films this is a rarity of thoughtfulness.

This abundantly creepy, and always controversial, British movie never goes out of style. Intelligently directed by Michael Powell... the story also allows for many levels of observation on the subject of voyeurism, which may go a long way toward explaining its popularity among film buffs.