The life of Marion, a young beautiful girl, who steals money from her boss, in order to have a new beginning with her former boyfriend, so she goes to hide inside an old motel, has been changed completely, as she struggles against survival.
Hitchcock probably wouldn't tell this story if he was making films today, and he certainly wouldn't tell it this way, with internal 'voices', back projection, minimal nudity and violence.
a true labour of love, an homage in such deliriously infatuated thrall to its inspiration that it seems more arthouse folly than studio cashcow - or, to cite the psychiatrist near the end of Psycho, "these were crimes of passion, not profit."
Janet Maslin
New York Times
January 01, 2000
It remains the most structurally elegant and sneakily playful of thrillers!
Tim Brayton
Antagony & Ecstasy
December 01, 2012
What Van Sant's film does, tremendously well, is make the material foreign again.
Van Sant has cranked up the realism about 20 points, but somehow what he achieves for the effort is a larger sense of banality!
Rob Nelson
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul
August 21, 2009
Already my mother and I mourn the day when some AVID editor will dare to digitally tweak Vertigo, spinning it into a virtual romantic comedy starring computer-directed replicas of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
