Double Take

Like the Master of Suspense's best films, Double Take (which makes great use of Bernard Herrmann's haunting "Psycho" score) is an intellectual puzzle that also works as a thoroughly accessible entertainment.

A documentary that practically defies description, Grimonprez's film is playful, provocative and very, very watchable.

Although it is composed mainly of archival footage and touches on a great many actual events, Double Take, as you may already have gathered, is not quite a documentary. It is, instead, a meditation on a series of loosely related themes drawn together, somewhat tenuously, by the familiar yet elusive sensibility that Hitchcock brought to Hollywood and then to American television.

Despite its many ominous implications, Grimonprez also infuses Double Take with sly wit, inserting scenes from the TV program showcasing Hitchcock's wry sense of humor and the exaggerated domesticity of commercials sponsored by Folgers Coffee.

Any 15-minute stretch of Double Take proves as enlightening as any other--more like a museum installation than a movie.

It’s a neurotic treatise that simply adds to our cultural dementia instead of illuminating it.