Vertigo

1958  ·  Film

A man follows a woman through San Francisco, and the film follows him all the way down.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a film about obsession that is willing to become one, slow and circling and hypnotic, returning again and again to the same streets, the same faces and the same unanswered question. James Stewart, so often the decent man on screen, plays a man whose wanting curdles into something darker, and Stewart lets you see every step of it without once asking for your sympathy. Kim Novak is the mystery at the centre, cool and remote and then suddenly, painfully human, and the film is wise enough to let her be more than the thing he is chasing.

San Francisco is the third star. The hills, the bay, the fog over the water and the long silent drives through steep streets give the film its dreamy, drifting rhythm, and Hitchcock shoots the city as if it were a memory being replayed. The colours are rich and strange, the pace deliberate, the mood heavy with longing. It is not an easy watch. It is a haunting one, and it stays with you for days, the way certain dreams do, long after the plot has settled. Watch it once for the story. Watch it again for everything else.

VERDICT  ·  Hitchcock at his most hypnotic: a slow, beautiful film about wanting someone too much.

POUR  ·  A neat rye.

Pairs with: The Slow-Burn Hitchcock