Hitchcock's most psychologically extreme film. Sight & Sound's number-one film of all time, 2012 edition.
Scottie Ferguson, a San Francisco police detective, develops acrophobia and resigns after a fellow officer dies during a rooftop chase. A college friend named Gavin Elster hires him to follow Elster's wife Madeleine, who Gavin claims is being possessed by the spirit of a long-dead ancestor. Scottie follows her, becomes obsessed with her, saves her from a suicide attempt in San Francisco Bay, and falls in love with her.
Madeleine appears to throw herself from a bell tower; Scottie's vertigo prevents him from climbing after her. He spirals. Months later he sees a woman on the street — Judy — who resembles Madeleine. The film's second half is Scottie reshaping Judy into Madeleine. Judy's secret, revealed to the audience midway through the second half, makes the project monstrous in ways the film does not let Scottie understand.
Vertigo is the strangest film in Hitchcock's filmography. It's not as commercially calibrated as Psycho, not as efficient as North by Northwest, not as locked-down as Rear Window. It's a romantic psychological thriller that openly explores its own male protagonist's pathology in a way the films before and after don't quite. It was a critical and commercial disappointment in 1958. It has been revalued, gradually, into one of the most-discussed films in cinema history.
The 2012 Sight & Sound poll of critics — the canonical decade-by-decade survey — voted Vertigo the greatest film ever made, displacing Citizen Kane, which had topped the poll since 1962. The 2022 poll moved Vertigo to second behind Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Its standing in serious film criticism is now fixed in a way it wasn't during Hitchcock's lifetime.
Vertigo is the film that invented the dolly zoom — the simultaneous camera dolly-out and zoom-in that creates the disorienting effect of the world changing scale while the subject stays fixed. Hitchcock had been trying to find a visual representation of vertigo for years; cinematographer Irmin Roberts cracked the technique by mounting the camera looking down a stairwell while a counter-tracking zoom maintained the staircase's apparent depth.
Every subsequent use of the dolly zoom — Jaws, Goodfellas, Mission: Impossible, Marriage Story — is quoting Vertigo. The technique is now so widely deployed that its origin is sometimes forgotten.
Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo is among the most-influential pieces of film music ever written. The descending three-note motif that underpins the film's romantic obsession has been quoted, parodied, and re-orchestrated across decades of film and television.
The film's second half — in which Scottie remakes Judy into Madeleine, dyeing her hair, buying her the same suit, persuading her to wear her hair the same way — is the section that has generated the most critical writing. It is openly an allegory of cinematic obsession. Hitchcock's framing of the sequence makes the male protagonist's project monstrous; the audience is asked to see what Scottie cannot see. The film's last shot is one of the bleakest closures in classical Hollywood cinema.