The View from the Rear Window

ANGELA CHILDS WORKS as a tech analyst for a company behind an Alexa-like device. Struggling with agoraphobia and anxieties aggravated by the pandemic, she spends her days cooped up in her roomy, brick-walled Seattle loft, reviewing flagged audio recordings. When she overhears the screams of a wom­an and what she believes to be a violent crime on one of the recordings, she is forced to confront her deepest fear. Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi (2022, Prime Video) cleverly updates the Alfred Hitchcock classic Rear Window to our present mo­ment: this age of virtual assistants and working from home.

The surveillance society, which the likes of George Orwell, Philip K Dick and David Brin warned us about, has gone online. Retailers know what we want to buy before we do. Streamers are constantly calibrating their algorithms to keep up with our viewing habits. Google emails us a timeline of where we’ve been. CCTVs atop traffic poles monitor us like the Eye of Sauron. GPS, smartphones and zoom lenses have enabled voyeurs to get slicker. Technology has sure made it easier for us to pry into each other’s lives. The already thin line between the watcher and the watched has gotten too permea­ble for comfort. Privacy was once illusive. Now it is elusive.

Living day after day in such a hyperconnected world and grappling with the anxieties that come with it have ushered the Hitchcockian thriller back into popular culture. From Kimi to Chloe Okuno’s debut feature Watcher (2022, Zee5), these modern takes wear their influences proudly on their sleeves, as they pull ideas, devices and stylistic earmarks from the Master of Suspense. If Kimi stretches the Rear Window framework into techno-paranoia territory, Watcher employs the same to explore a woman’s fear of being watched but not believed.

Of all the Hitchcock thrillers, Rear Window may be his defin­ing effort. Vertigo may have been more enigmatic and invited more readings. Psycho may have been more chilling and a better showcase of the director’s manipulative gifts. But none of his films is as keyed into our current anxieties as Rear Window: a prescient examination of our voyeuristic impulses, our restless channel-surfing urges and our media consumption. The film could very well be considered the original social distancing thriller — long before the word became a part of our everyday vocabulary. James Stewart is Jeff, a bored and incapacitated pho­tographer forced into lockdown who must entertain himself by spying on his neighbours. These are pre-Netflix times. Now imagine if Jeff had the tools of surveillance that we have readily available to us. He, of course, must make do with a pair of binoc­ulars and a camera with a decent zoom lens. What he sees and speculates—we do too. By aligning Jeff’s point of view with our own, Hitchcock toyed with the idea of the moviegoer as voyeur: the window evoking the screen on which images are projected and reflecting our voyeuristic position. As he compels us to in­dulge in the pleasure of watching, he also creates a contradictory feeling of unease to make us aware of our own culpability. At one point, Thelma Ritter’s nurse Stella chides Jeff when she sees him glued to the window. “We’ve become a nation of peeping toms,” she says. A moment later, she joins him to play voyeur. We are all Stella. We judge and we indulge. Everyone is watching and being watched.

By bringing Hitchcock’s preoc­cupations to the digital age, films like Kimi and Watcher scrutinise how our voyeuristic impulses have magnified with the prolifera­tion of invasive technologies. How the act of watching can convey power upon the watcher at the expense of the watched. When does watching go from natural curiosity to violation of privacy? Where must the line be drawn? These are some of the questions modern filmmakers explore with their nu-Hitchcockian set-ups.

The set-up of Watcher advances the third-act turn of Rear Window for a sustained exercise in isolation and paranoia: what if as Jeff was looking at the murderous neighbour, the murderous neighbour was looking back at Jeff right from the start. In place of Jeff is Maika Monroe in fine form as Julia, a former actress who relocates from the US to Romania with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman). She appears to have left her career so he can advance his. Out of work, alone in a foreign country and with no friends, she gazes out the oversized windows of her luxurious apartment at the grey derelict building across the street. Gazing back from one of the windows is a shadowy figure, who the camera obscures by design. Loneliness spirals into terror when she suspects the neighbour may be following her around. By not subtitling the Romanian dialogue, Okuno traps us in Julia’s isolated PoV. Paranoia sets in when Julia decides to catch an afternoon matinee of the Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn classic Charade (often described as “the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made”), only to be perturbed by the heavy breaths of a man who decides to sit right behind her in a virtually empty cinema. News reports mention a serial killer targeting women. Julia is convinced she is next. But will anyone believe her? If Hitchcock suggested the pleasure of cinema is in the eye of the voyeur, Okuno suggests paranoia is the darkened window separating the watcher and the watched. Julia is every woman navigating hostile masculine spaces, with one eye watching the front and the other surveying the shadows. The horror lies in the fear of not being believed. So, it’s not just Hitchcock’s spirit that looms over the film, but also Roman Polanski’s, with the particular echoes of Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby.

Similarly, the set-up of Kimi nods at Hitchcock superfan Brian De Palma’s conspiracy thriller Blow Out. Soderbergh casts Zoë Kravitz in the John Travolta role as the reluctant hero who acci­dentally overhears a murder and attempts to expose the cover-up. The sleuthing doesn’t take Kravitz’s Angela to the outside world till she is left with no choice. It begins within the confines of her loft as she contacts her co-workers and boss for information via her computer, framed as a window in itself. The setting doesn’t prevent Soderbergh from mining suspense. A quotidian detail like a blinking cursor or a bottle placed precarious­ly on the edge of the kitchen coun­ter can do the trick. Confinement in fact plays to the film’s advantage. As the camera glides and swoops in from various angles, it better acquaints us to the prison Angela has made for herself. Soderbergh, working triple duty as director, DoP and editor, riffs not only on Rear Window’s themes, but also its shot composition. When Angela scans the adjacent building and the street below, her subjective viewpoint is intercut with an objective one. But Soderbergh adds another subjective viewpoint operating incognito to create a fear of the unknown, toppling the audience from their position of omniscience. So­derbergh disassembles the mechanics that fortified Hitchcock’s thrillers and reassembles them in his own design. When Angela leaves her sanctuary for the first time, the sensory overload of the urban environment is conveyed via woozy camerawork. Similar to how the dolly zoom conveys the protagonist’s fear of heights in Vertigo, a combination of shaky handheld and canted angles convey the agoraphobic Angela’s distorted perception: how she sees and navigates the world.

Echoes of Vertigo ring louder than those of Rear Window in Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (2022, MUBI). A Busan de­tective (Park Hae-il) finds himself attracted to the prime suspect (Tang Wei) of a homicide investigation in a tale of two halves. Where the Hollywood maestro dwelled on how obsession can only lead to the destruction of the obsessed and the object of his obsession, the South Korean master smuggles in a devastating love story inside a noir mystery. François Truffaut once described how Hitchcock filmed love scenes as if they were murder scenes and murder scenes as if they were love scenes. In a similar vein, Park films a murder investigation as if it were a romantic quest and a romantic quest as if it were a murder investigation. Interrogation resembles a date. Surveillance feels like seduction. Affection eases suspicion.

Channelling Hitchcock, Park takes great delight in formal deliberations. In a film where characters are hiding things from each other and themselves, the slippery nature of truth is expressed via mirror images, misty settings and shifting vantage points. The camera at one point assumes the PoV of a phone, overlaying the text reflected backwards on the screen. So, the eyes of the sender are in effect facing the recipient, not the phone—a cute touch for a romance. Be it for texting, recording, translating, or locating, smartphones are integrated into the narrative schema seamlessly. At another point, the camera assumes the PoV of the dead man, obscured by an ant crawling over his eyes, as if to suggest a clouded vi­sion. Given the detective is an insomniac, fantasy merges into reality, which Park conveys via the most creative transitions. The star-crossed lovers’ longing for each other bleeds into the visuals, as they project themselves to where they want to be. Park and his co-screenwriter Jeong Seo-kyeong have written just about the most beguiling reverie of love, projection, desire and regret in the cinematic language of an old-school detective mystery.

Charlie McDowell’s Windfall (2022, Netflix) puts a contem­porary spin on the old-school single-location thriller a la Rope. Hitchcockian more in style rather than in suspense, the film opens with vintage yellow title cards. As the camera pans to reveal a gorgeous vacation home complete with French doors, a stone patio, a pool and an orange grove, brass orchestration plays over the credits to suggest something ominous hangs in the summer air. A clueless burglar (Jason Segel) is ill-equipped to deal with the unexpected arrival of the homeowners: a tech billion­aire (Jesse Plemons) and his wife (Lily Collins) hoping to enjoy their weekend getaway. Class rage and cracks in the marriage make for an economic combo for a Hitchcockian chamber piece. But Windfall also wants to satirise wealth-hoarding, take digs at toxic masculinity and burst the bubble of the entitled. Where Hitchcock would have held us hostage in a pressure cooker of tension, McDowell loses us in his overcalculation of what could have been a solid home-invasion thriller.

In Hitchcock’s best films, Bernard Herrmann’s music was a character in its own right. So is the music in the four recent nu-Hitchcockian thrillers. Kimi’s composer Cliff Martinez adds another dimension to Angela’s fear and paranoia with a classic-contemporary mix of strings and synths. If Windfall opts for more orchestral drama and dissonance, Watcher keeps it simple with strings. In both Watcher and Kimi, the music mirrors the fraught subjectivity of their protagonists. Jo Yeong-wook pairs strings and woodwinds to quite a rapturous effect in Decision to Leave.

On the comedy side, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s Do Revenge (2022, Netflix) reimagines Strangers on a Train as a dark teen comedy. Instead of two men plotting a “You kill for me, I kill for you” scheme, two teenage girls plot a “You bring my ex down, I bring down your rival” scheme. Before scores can be settled, a mid-way twist reorients the story. But the film neither impresses as a revenge thriller nor as a dark comedy, undercut by its desire to play “Guess which teen movie we are referencing?” with the audience.

Do Revenge aside, it should come as no surprise why the Hitchcockian thriller is back in fashion and continues to cap­ture our fascination. Hitchcock, as Truffaut said, was “an artist of anxiety,” and there still remain plenty of films in his cata­logue worth updating to reflect our modern anxieties. When done well, they can keep us on edge and at the same time put a morbid grin on our faces. Two hours of anxiety is a price we would happily pay for the restless pleasure of suspense.

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