It’s fitting that Robert Altman’s 1972 drama Images is so preoccupied with lenses, mirrors and reflections as it’s a masterclass in showing rather than telling. It’s an evocation of a mental breakdown, playing out its main character’s unsteady mental state right in front of your eyes using every trick in cinema’s magic bag. It puts you inside her crisis, forcing you to succumb to its internal logic until you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, either.
Images revolves around Cathryn (Susannah York), a stylish, affluent author of fantastic children’s books. One night she receives a series of ominous, anonymous phone calls suggesting that her husband Hugh (René Auberjonois) has been unfaithful. When she confronts him, another mysterious man suddenly takes his place. Shaken, the pair decide to take a vacation to the Irish countryside where Cathryn grew up. When they arrive, Cathryn sees herself and Hugh pull up to the vacation house.
Over the course of their vacation, Cathryn continues to have disturbing visions. The mysterious man who takes the place of her husband turns out to be Rene (Marcel Bozzuffi), her former husband who had died several years previously in a plane crash. Hugh encounters Marcel (Hugh Millais) and his daughter Susanna (Cathryn Harrison). It seems Cathryn and Marcel had some sort of fling in the past, which he’s desperate to revive. He joins Cathryn’s spectral men, as her mental deterioration accelerates.
Her visions begin to turn violent after Rene invites her to shoot him with a shotgun. She proceeds to bloodily murder each of the phantasms in turn, resulting in some of the movie’s most nail-biting moments, some of which are only possible in Images once you’ve succumbed to its spell. The stress and anxiety of waiting for Susanna to discover her father’s bloody corpse is one thing, but it’s a whole different animal when combined with the added anxiety of wondering whether or not it’s even real or if it’s all in Cathryn’s head. You truly don’t know how to feel when Susanna skips right over where her dad’s corpse had been laid out only five minutes earlier. It’s a premonitory rumble of the movie’s final chilling climax, where you’ll still be left wondering what just happened.
Images is a psychological film, and a smart and insightful one at that. It shows you Cathryn’s traumas and triggers, like the appearance of dogs making Cathryn nervous or a series of nearly identical sexual liaisons with all three men, illustrating unhealthy patterns possibly brought on by childhood abandonment and neglect. Seeing these psychological states play out in such lush, vivid, colorful imagery right before your eyes pulls you into the movie’s magical logic, letting you experience what it’s like to not be able to trust your senses, the world around you or even your own memory.
Not only is Images a symbolic masterpiece, it’s also a technical triumph. Much of its incantatory power comes from a strict inner discipline, like the presence of a camera in every scene when Cathryn suspects Hugh of cheating. Images follows a set rhythm, too, with a scene set in “real life” followed by an encounter with one of the phantom men which, in turn, is followed by a more pastoral scene, usually accompanied by John Williams’ striking, completely unexpected atonal musique concrete score. The music and sound design are just as disciplined and focused as the visuals, with the bendy metal glissandi of musical saws emphasizing the unsteady ground of a mental break. A mixture of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds adds to the feeling of unreality, giving voice to the feeling of the blurring of fantasy and fact.
Stories are one of the central themes of Images – the stories we concoct to cover up trauma as well as the tales we tell to pass the time. This theory is supported by Cathryn’s fairy tale narration during the idyllic bits. It also reflects on our inability to truly know another, illustrated with its fixation on distorting glass and polished mirrors. It’s able to say all of this, in one place at one time, is largely due to the film’s reliance on rich symbolic imagery and formal mastery rather than heavy-handed exposition. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind gem, not just in Altman’s filmography but in the history of horror and psychological thrillers.
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