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In the end, Passion might not be much more than a glib, embittered bit of gamesmanship by somebody who’s pretty much been on the sidelines since the mid-’90s, but there’s something sort of sweet about seeing its maker continuing to play by his own rules.

It has something that so many mainstream American movies today are lacking: an appreciation for cinema's irrational power over its audience. And De Palma, old-school enough that he closes Passion with a title card reading "The End," made a film that's best understood through the psychodramatic lens of classic noir, while at the same time working a twist on his own formula.

In essence, Passion is a costume drama disguised as a flick about female competition and crime solving. Like any fierce cinematic bitch with a large bank account, Christine is dressed to the nine's in designer duds and fancy make-up. She favors bold colors, sexy necklines and the most crimson and fuchsia of lipsticks. Isabel, on the other hand, is almost completely void of color and sex appeal...

‘You're seeing the unreliable narrator', says De Palma. But what does it mean to see an unreliable narration unfolding? What actually happens in Passion is more complex than in literary fiction: it is not only the character performing, but also the film itself!

Many of the compositions exhibit classical virtues of symmetry and opposition. De Palma regularly dresses the dark-haired Rapace in all-black and the blonde McAdams in white or red. Even before De Palma starts introducing preposterous coincidences and double crosses, the characters register as doppelgangers—Rapace's flat underplaying seems intended to compliment McAdams's exuberant hamminess (which is a hoot, by the way).

A viewer's impatience with Passion's dull police procedural all but guarantees he'll be blindsided by the elaborate trap the director is laying in plain sight. When De Palma springs it, in a denouement of spiraling delirium that deploys tropes from across his career, the laughter it produces is eruptive — part giddiness at watching the dominoes topple, part amused acknowledgement of how thoroughly we've been suckered.

De Palma's virtuosic joy in image-making... is irrepressible, and one extended split-screen sequence is astonishingly meticulous and seductive. Yet the movie shows, above all, why the mid-level drama is almost extinct: despite De Palma's lavish proof of what he can accomplish with classical technique, the movie comes off as too much for too little, a collection of mechanisms that decorate mechanisms.

In Passion, De Palma is fixated on perspectives, particularly in the form of modern technologies such as the cameras that exist in our phones, in our computers and in unseen alcoves for the purposes of surveillance. What at first appears to be flagrant product placement for Apple reveals itself to be founded on a more substantial rationale: De Palma is investigating the implications of the very proliferation of connectivity that Apple has pioneered.

A split-screen showpiece devoting half the frame to a ballet performance and the other half to an impending act of violence gets the pulse racing, but only after a whole lot of laborious setup, much of which serves as a contest between Rapace and McAdams to see who can most fully abandon any semblance of credible human behavior... Ultimately, De Palma is too self-serious to make delectable schlock, which is all that Passionreally aspires to be

Late in Passion, stylistic flourishes mark Isabelle's descent into a warped nightmare, distorting her sense of what's real and what's not. Is she simply obsessed with tumbling down the rabbit hole, or is it actually happening? Passion is so intoxicating because it doesn't try to answer this question. Instead, De Palma opts for a more immersive approach to the way filmmaking and creativity in general can be used to reflect a new kind of corporate hierarchy...

The style-versus-substance debates that have plagued the director since he dared filter Hitchcockian perversity through his cockeyed aesthetic prism will rage on. Yet those who submit to the movie's spell may well find themselves giddy at how viscerally and confidently an old master can deploy the tools of his trade.

More than a mere return to form, "Passion" updates one of the director's best, "Dressed to Kill." Like that film, it deals in dubious sexual politics, a thriller that is somehow more effective for being predictable, and a hallucinatory dénouement that, in "Passion's" case, stretches out to cover the whole back half. But the trashy aesthetic of the earlier film has been sublimated into modern form...