Altman does psychological horror with the best of them

*Spoilers*

I believe, without question, Images is one of most overlooked underrated achievements of the horror genre. How could this be? Obviously it’s nowhere near squishy enough for today’s audiences. Perhaps more worryingly because it’s been misfiled in the small category of wayward directing from the director and Altman fans believe it belongs alongside Quintet, Beyond Therapy, Popeye and Prêt-à-Porter. All of these found few admirers, yet those I know – who are few – that’ve seen Images recognise it as a work of astonishing pictorial grace and subtlety and is unequivocally one of, if not the greatest screen study of schizophrenia.

Images is Altman’s most technically daring film using spectacular displays of camera sophistication to capture something about life at its most elusive. The tale of an unbalanced woman coming apart at the seams amidst beautiful country isolation, mired in a sardonic and failing marriage. Cathryn is a mess of introverted self-obsession, striving for a love she can’t give herself, lost in a perceptual hall of mirrors. Her aspirations are represented by her creative outlet, the writing of children’s fiction of a particularly labyrinthine, neurotically convoluted sort. Turning to this world of elfin magic is her escape route from reality, a reality grown cold and haunted by spectres of failed love, lost love and unwanted sexual attention. The painful realities of life invade her reveries leading to confusion between imagined and real events – and on into murder.

Cathryn (Susannah York) and her husband, Hugh (René Auberjonois) drive to their secluded country retreat to help calm Cathryn’s nerves but instead of relaxing she begins ‘bumping into’ old acquaintances – René (Marcel Bozzuffi), an old and supposed dead lover, and Marcel (Hugh Millais), a brutal philandering buddy of Hugh’s – who may, or may not really be there (starting to notice a pattern in the actor’s screen and real names, yet?)

The concept of the uncanny implied in the German term unhiemlich – unhomelike – is a crucial and major factor in Altman’s method for generating unease and the representation of Cathryn’s psychosis.

Glencove, the country home of Cathryn and Hugh, is a gorgeous rambling affair rather lacking warmth (thanks to excellent art design and photography) and unlike the town house, is cut off from technological links. No phone, no TV or radio, just lots of silence to get lost in and fragments of conversations to misconstrue.

Hugh’s in a world of his own as much as Cathryn, albeit a less neurotic one. Exploring the upper floor of Glencove after Cathryn insists she’s heard an intruder he returns having found nothing but instead of telling her this, jangles his wife’s nerves further by sticking a mounted deer’s head round the corner of the stair landing. The effect is funny but unnerving, even to the viewer, who is gradually being drawn into looking at events through the jittery paranoiac prism of Cathryn’s skewed perceptions.

Altman’s filming of this story continuously maintains a formidable perceptual ambiguity to events. He is, like Stanley Kubrick, a master of the zoom, able to achieve great things with this highly misused tool. Constant shifts of focal length mean that we’re never sure where out attention will be guided next, a supple, fluid way of creating visual analogues for Cathryn’s micro-macro confusions. The unnerving lop-sided framing is also a major contribution to mood, whilst the photography shifts from luminous clarity to a vague, soft-hued texture for certain close-ups; a technique that creates abstraction from the initial representational elements.

There is an ambiguous quality to the way Altman depicts Cathryn, who is at times satirised, at times indulged by the scenario. Those who need to feel they like or sympathise with a lead character may have difficulty with Images but this dual approach to character is typical of Cathryn’s condition. She is both the compelling, troubled and fractured focus of the film and an introverted, self-obsessed nutbar, able to show a steely, sardonic, intolerant side, yet given to cutesy embroidering of reality via the pretentious musings of her fiction.

The book In Search Of Unicorns was actually written by Susannah York herself as a book for children, and is just one of the many parallels between the film and the cast. Altman has René Auberjonois play Hugh, Marcel Bozzuffi play René, and Hugh Millais play Marcel. Spookiest of all, Susannah the little girl who befriends Susannah York’s Cathryn, is played by the weirdly blasé Cathryn Harrison, a young actress whose off-handed, non-actorly composure is one of the creepiest elements in the film. Altman plays with the similarities and cross-generational friendship between them in a way which recalls Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. The strange self-aware child refers to the same game of pretend that’s run amok and swamped the older woman’s life.

Images makes much play with words but never abandons the faculty suggested by its stark and minimal title. There are a variety of impressive visual tricks that counterpoint the dialogue. An elaborate piece of visual theatre is Hugh’s ostentatious handling of his hinged reading glasses as he removes, folds and pockets them in one smooth, uninterrupted motion while patiently explaining how he received a message without having a phone in the house. The camera rarely stops moving to capture such odd little details and physical juxtapositions. In keeping with the schizophrenic quality of Cathryn’s perception, certain gestures and movements are invested with a tantalising significance, while the presence of stills, cameras, mirrors and other reflective surfaces constantly emphasises both the character’s troubled self-image and the spectator’s involvement in a dramatic fiction.

In a way conventional film is nearly always afraid to do, Images invites us both to become absorbed by a drama of private anguish and to examine the cinematic techniques being used to secure our involvement.

There is one scene that achieves a sublime effect from the simplest of manoeuvres; that most special perceptual hallmark of a real movie trip – an impossible moment shown incontrovertibly as only film can. Cathryn is with Hugh in the hills above Glencove, the country house they are about to drive down to occupy for their holiday. Hugh goes off to take pot-shots at some quail, leaving Cathryn scanning the terrain, looking down at the house in the distance far below. A glint of sunlight on chrome draws her attention to a car pulling up at the house. Looking through the binoculars it is revealed to Cathryn that the car is hers and Hugh’s own and as she watches a woman gets out and turns to look up at the hillside. It’s Cathryn, and she’s waving up there to a figure on the hill, miles away, silhouetted on the crest in microscopic isolation. Smiling, she turns away from the lonely figure on the hill and walks inside the house. We never cut back to the first space-time location again.

Reverberating in the mind with perceptual and structural tricks like this, Altman’s optical labyrinth-cum-murder thriller repays the attention over repeated viewing. Cathryn’s doppelganger makes more than one appearance and in one scene, filled with the urge to defeat her demons, Cathryn seemingly disposes of it permanently but Altman’s camera will later reveal the awful truth. Fans of psychological horror will pass this by at their peril.


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