After an accident the detective John «Scottie» Ferguson suffers from vertigo and has to retire. However, an old acquaintance hires him to spy on his wife Madeleine, during which Scottie saves her life. Despite her mysterious behaviour, they soon fall in love. But the affair abruptly comes to an end when she falls off a tower to her death. Chained by his vertigo, Scottie powerlessly witnesses her death and falls into a deep depression. But then he meets a women who eerily resembles Madeleine, and he sets out to remake her in Madeleine’s image…
No one knows how to play with expectations better than Hitchcock, and in _Vertigo_ he perfected his art. *With every unexpected twist the tension rises, and one cannot help but fall for his tricks again and again – and deeper each time.* He employs a simple but subtle cinematic language that permeates the film at each level. And so the film circles – in its camera movements, its music, its narrative – around unfulfillable desires and protagonists who simultaneously cheat each other and themselves and yet are obsessed with one another.
No wonder this film has drawn generation upon generation into its orbit. To the point of obsession.
_Michael Schmutzer_
