Reliably Masterful

Watched Vertigo for the first time a few days ago. I can't call myself a Hitchcock fan, but I've almost never watched a movie he made that I didn't enjoy. What's common about his films is how you're placed in the center of the mystery and can't quite catch your bearings at any point. You have a sense of which way things are headed, who the bad guy might be, but there are any number of reasons to second-guess yourself, hence the unsettled feeling of lacking bearings. That's where the mastery lies, at least for me: being able to produce this effect reliably in every movie.

Vertigo was no different. The husband who hires the ex-detective feels like the bad guy at first blush. Something isn't straight about his story. Yet he does nothing further to confirm his villainy. The wife who's being observed and followed acts in strange, unpredictable ways, as we're told she would. If there's something criminal going on with her, it's not immediately obvious. We're led to believe that the ex-detective's growing obsession with her might in fact be the issue that will turn out to be the real problem. So you go back and forth between various ideas and characters while the story proceeds to its masterful denouement.

When you learn the truth, there's relief because it fills in the blanks of one of the options you'd entertained to begin with. This is how Hitchcock delivers for the viewer. They were almost there but not quite, and that's inherently satisfying.