Psycho
Matt Singer

Review by Matt Singer Patron

Psycho 1998

★★

Watched 01 Nov 2022

Say what you will about the staff, the water pressure in the Bates Motel shower looks really solid. There’s nothing worse than a hotel shower that feels like you’re standing under a drippy garden hose.

Okay, maybe there are some things that are worse...

To me, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is a fascinating if failed experiment, and a huge missed opportunity. Because one of the things Hitchcock’s Psycho did that was so revolutionary was the way it shocked audiences by killing the character everyone assumed was its lead, Marion Crane, about 40 minutes into the movie. That’s part of what made the shower scene so effective in 1960. It wasn’t just the violence, it was that the violence was aimed at the character viewers had pegged as the primary heroine about 40 minutes into the film.

If you asked me to pitch a Psycho remake, I would have played with that element by shocking the 1998 audience all over again. I’d do the shot-for-shoot approach up to the shower scene. At that point, instead of sticking closely to Hitchcock’s script and direction for another 60 minutes, I’d swerve into new territory. Maybe Marion kills Mother. Maybe she gets stalked through the Bates Motel by Norman and the rest of the movie is about her fight for survival.

Do anything, in other words but a shot-for-shot remake of the second hour. That way, once you lull the audience into thinking they know the movie they’re watching, you pull the rug out from under them the same way Hitchcock did when Marion stepped into the shower in her Bates Motel cabin. In a way, that would have been a more faithful remake of the spirit of Psycho than this slavish recreation of it.

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