Images (1972)

Real or Imaginary?

Shadow Watcher
Nobody Drowns in Mineral Lake

Susannah York delivered the boldest performance of her career in this intriguing, deliberately-paced drama, written and directed by Robert Altman. She plays a schizophrenic woman who is haunted by hallucinatory apparitions of lovers, past and present.

The 1972 release is a mind teaser. Neither the viewer nor Susannah knows quite what is genuine and what isn't, thus when she starts killing these apparitions, we don't really know if she's murdering a ghost or a real person.

Rene Auberjonois and Marcel Bozzuffi co-star.

For the DVD, Altman supplies audio commentary and an on-camera interview.

© Michael B. Druxman, author of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (available December 2008) October 12, 2008

Remembered

I hadn't seen this film available on DVD. It was fondly remebered from the 1970's - a haunting film and performance by Susannah York. July 4, 2008

Images

Weird, creepy film builds dread and disorientation as we experience madness right alongside the central character. Altman's choice of rustic Irish setting is ideal, as cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond uses its dank, remote quality to accentuate Cathryn's building isolation and paranoia. The movie's bleak, opaque quality will not be to all tastes, but psychological horror fans should pounce. York is outstanding in the lead. July 3, 2007

Can you work this out?

Robert Altman's "Images" is a powerful and bewildering film. It's ability to throw the viewer completely numerous times throughout it's running time is something I have seldom encountered before while watching a psychological thriller. You'll need to have all your wits about you to appreciate what you see here.

The plot, as written on paper, is not complicated. Susannah York plays Cathryn, a married woman who seems rather highly strung and nervous. Together with her husband she goes to a remote house in the country to write a children's book. Once there, she gradually begins to lose her grip on reality. That's all I can really be sure about, because the viewer lives Cathryn's experience as fully as the character does. Throughout the movie, events happen that can't possibly be explained as rational or real, and the only possible explanation is that Cathryn is hallucinating. A film that does this without ever making it clear whether the audience it supposed to be able to work out what is reality and what is a dream, is audacious indeed. I watched, baffled, as Cathryn encountered various people who may or may not have actually been there, saw her own double moving around the landscape, received mocking telephone calls, and had whole conversations with someone in the room who then suddenly became someone else. It took the first 30 minutes of watching to become accustomed to how slickly the film tosses you between the various states of reality and unreality. Once I loosened up and started to just go with it, it was easier...oddly enough, I was mirroring the emotions of the main character, as she too realises that if she can't shake the nightmare off, she's going to have to just deal with it...watch the movie to see how she does!

Although disorientating, thanks to the overall quality of the film, it becomes a fairly gripping experience to actually watch. You really never know what is going to happen next, or what thing Cathryn has just experienced is going to turn out to have been imagined. And not in some corny, cliche-d way like a friend saying "But so-and-so couldn't have just been here - he died two weeks ago!". It's all much more subtle than that. As films that tamper with your perception of what is reality and what is not go, there are few other works that can rival this. It's been compared to Polanski's "Repulsion", and I think the comparison is fair, but "Images" manages to be an even more immersive experience than that film. Susannah York never hits a false note as the troubled Cathryn, and all the other actors do well, acting naturally and understatedly, especially Cathryn Harrison as the teenage daughter of one of the (few) other characters.

By the time the credits roll, you may feel terminally confused, speechless, or even cheated, but there's no doubt in my mind that you'll remember it as a fascinating 95 minute experience. This film is a significant contribution to the cinema as a whole, and quite a remarkable acheivement. April 23, 2007

A brilliant and disturbing journey inside one woman's mind

"Images" is another great movie from the master of the living paintings, Robert Altman. It is a brilliant, scary, beautiful, and very disturbing journey inside one woman's mind that was leaving her as the movie progressed. What we saw was not a ghost story but a very real descent to the world of nightmares and monsters that would not stop torturing the struggling and guilty mind for a second.

Susannah York as Cathryn, a young writer who tries to finish a children's book in a remote country home is simply breathtaking. She carries the movie (which only has five characters) almost by herself and being present in every scene, she is equally sympathetic and frightening. In his interview on DVD, Altman mentioned that he had started making the movie in Milan with Sophia Lauren. As much as I admire Lauren, I don't see anyone other than York playing Cathryn. While watching her, I kept thinking of her Alice in Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). Alice, one of the participants and victims of a killing dance marathon, loses her mind by the end of the movie and the scene where she breaks down mentally, was heartbreaking. Altman himself reminded me of the witches from Shakespeare's Macbeth that would throw all kinds of ingredients in their cauldron. The director mentioned how he would add the new details to the script as the real life situations changed: York was writing the children's book about Unicorns at the time - we can hear the long parts of her book in the background. I am not too crazy about the book but the idea seems to be brilliant. York had informed Altman that she could not make the movie because she was pregnant but Altman just decided to add her pregnancy to the script. There is some dry humor in the movie - all five characters have the first names of the actors who played them: Susannah played Cathryn and young Cathryn Harrison plays a girl named Susannah, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi, and Hugh Millais played three men in Cathryn's life - Hugh, the husband, Rene - the neighbor, and Marcel, her dead lover (who was quite alive for a dead man, at least in her memory). John Williams wrote an absolutely unforgettable score for the film (it is not a melody, rather some strange, persistent, scary, and disturbing sounds - very experimental at the time, it is still quite unusual).

As for its visual site - the film that was made during one wet November in Ireland is brilliantly dark and hypnotizingly beautiful. I am jealous of everyone who was able to see it in all its glory on the big screen at the theater - it would be impossible to forget.



February 24, 2007

More reviews at Amazon.com ...