#42 Psycho

In Summary

Psycho is a tense, almost claustrophobic, film that captures that anxious feeling of someone attempting to catch you out for lying.

The opening 45 minutes of the film is incredibly tense and nerve-inducing. Scored almost entirely by these lurking, looming violins, it follows the protagonist, Marion Crane, as she steels $40,000 from her employers and goes on the run.

That period of the film captures a sense of paranoia and anxiousness that goes with transgressing the law. It constantly feels as if she is looking over her shoulder, checking and double-checking her behaviour, attempting to act as normally as possible, only to come across as even more suspicious.

Psycho ramps up these feelings further as Marion stops off at the Bates Motel. The motel's proprietor, Norman Bates, seems pleasant enough, but there is a sense of there being something not quite right about him, as well as the place in general.

We quickly learn that Norman has a controlling mother, a hobby of stuffing dead birds - which he unconvincingly explains - and has a peephole fitted so he can peer into the rooms to which Marion get undressed. Perhaps he's just a pervert, but the tone of the film suggests there may be something darker.

Then, we get one of the most iconic scenes in film history - the shower murder. Those looming violins turn staccato, stabbing the audience's ears in time to the killer's lunges. It pulls out the rug from under the audience's feet, our protagonist is dead.

The rest of Psycho is about resolving the mystery behind the Bates Motel. The film showed an old woman holding the knife, only for the film to gradually pull away at that certainty, revealing a darker, stranger truth.

A Memorable Quote

It's not like my mother is a maniac or a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?

Things You May Not Know

• The film was shot in black and white in part to reduce costs and in part to get the violence past censors.
• It is the one of the first American films to show a toilet.
• Alfred Hitchcock considered splitting the film into two and putting it onto his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

One of the Greatest of All Time?
Psycho was an incredibly transgressive film at the time of its release, while time has dulled that aspect of the film, it remains an incredibly atmospheric and tense piece of work that constantly unsettles and misleads the audience.

The opening 45 minutes of Psycho is among the tensest cinema ever made, culminating in that iconic shower scene. While the murdering of the protagonist a third of the way into the film imbues the rest of Psycho with a sense of unpredictable threat, the final two thirds of the film are slower and less interesting than the opening.

While Psycho arguably isn't Alfred Hitchcock's best work, it remains compelling viewing.