★★★★★
Martin Scorsese famously described this career-killing Michael Powell chiller as a movie that “says everything that can be said about film-making”. That’s a damning indictment of the sadism at the core of cinema. For this is a film about a man, Mark (Carl Boehm), who delights in filming women up close while killing them and using a mirror atop his camera to capture their reactions to their impending deaths.
No wonder the critics hated it. They circled their wagons and protected themselves. Because this was the first film that asked movie watchers to stare into their own murder mirrors and interrogate the pleasures gained from looking. It suggested that there is something fundamentally creepy about sitting in the dark and consuming unseen the captured images of pretty people spread out before us, for our delectation. Powell knew it. Scorsese knows it. The film remains dangerous, and brilliant, because of it.
15, 101min
In cinemas
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