Three Films Make A Post: Norman Bates is back home with Mother again!

Psycho III (1986): At the time when this was made, critics inexplicably saw this second Psycho sequel as clearly superior to the actually brilliant second one (about which I’ll hopefully write someday). I simply can’t see it: Anthony Perkins’s direction is bland and often aims for a sub-Ken Russell style of camp he’s simply not good enough a director to reach, the script is obvious and not very interesting, and even Perkins’s performance is lacking the element of humanity he found in the Hitchcock original and even more so in the second movie.

Otherwise, this repeats a couple of the least interesting plot beats of film number two and has scenes that “nod” to the original in a way only Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot reshoot managed to surpass in pointlessness.

Watcher (2022): On paper, Chloe Okuno’s thriller about an American woman either becoming paranoid or becoming the future victim of a killer in Bucharest is yet another “Girl/Woman in the Whatever” thriller, this time with quite a few direct homages to Hitchcock (that guy again). But Okuno manages to actually recontextualize the Hitchcockian elements and use them to build a female perspective that runs parallel as well as against Hitchcock’s often creepily male one, enriching a genre while clearly following most of its rules. The film’s visual style and feel also very pleasantly reminded me of the best giallos as well as a little of Don’t Look Now. Add to this highly focussed and effective performances, particularly by genre stalwarts Maika Monroe and Burn Gorman, and you have quite the film.

Patience (After Sebald) (2012): Ending on an equally high note, there’s this hypnotic documentary by Grant Gee that follows the traces of W.G. Sebald and his great book “The Rings of Saturn” in a manner as digressive and complicated as its subject.

Most of what would usually be talking heads in this kind of film comes from the off, which leaves space for longer thoughts and sentences and enables Gee to strengthen and deepen, or counterpoint, ideas via his successful attempts at recreating the mood and style of Sebald’s photography. The film’s understanding of how important mood is for its subject is rather impressive anyway; it also explains why this needs to be a movie instead of a monograph.