Peeping Tom (1960)
Film details
Horror · Thriller · Drama · Michael Powell · 1h 41min
Synopsis
Loner Mark Lewis works at a film studio during the day and, at night, takes racy photographs of women. Also he's making a documentary on fear, which involves recording the reactions of victims as he murders them. He befriends Helen, the daughter of the family living in the apartment below his, and he tells her vaguely about the movie he is making.
Verdict
Disturbing psychological thriller about the roots of evil in child abuse.
In-depth analysis
Peeping Tom is a landmark of British cinema that Michael Powell paid dearly for: its 1960 release destroyed his career. The film confronts the viewer with a killer who films the terror of his victims before killing them, but it does so with a moral lucidity that his contemporaries failed to perceive. The protagonist is not an innate monster, but the result of a perverse scientific experiment: his father used him from childhood as a subject for the study of fear, shattering any possibility of a healthy psyche. Powell does not justify the crimes; he explains them. The difference is crucial. The screenplay presents the scientist father as the true criminal, and the son as a victim who victimizes others, trapped in a compulsion that he himself recognizes as an illness. The violence is less explicit than the psychological tension: the film operates through suggestion and atmosphere. What is most unsettling is that Powell includes the viewer in the chain of voyeurism: we too gaze upon what we ought not. For parents: it is an adult work that requires emotional maturity. Not suitable for minors, but valuable for those who can confront the stark portrayal of how evil begets evil.