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Rating: THE DEVIL'S GAZE.
The perspective through the viewfinder of an amateur filmmaker curiously follows the swaying hips of a prostitute in a seedy alley. She calmly climbs the stairs leading to a rendezvous room. The woman undresses on the bed, and the zoom of the camera slowly draws closer. Until it distills, captured on film in vivid colors, the surprised and immediately thereafter terrified expression of the 'protagonist'..
Mark Lewis (a chilling, morbid Karl Boehm) lives through the lens of his camera. Nothing else matters; everything is merely unnecessary footnotes to an indifferent life. Mark has a secret. In fact, he keeps a few that don't quite align with the typical image of the shy and 'good guy' he projects. In his blond face and polite, silent gestures. Like that light and invisible step that takes him home every evening, to the house of which he is the owner and respectful tenant on the upper floor. Partially rented to people unaware of such a reserved landlord and his 'strange' habits. During the day, Mark is the camera assistant at a small film studio, and in his spare time, he shoots risqué photo shoots at a local newsstand. Mark is wounded, torn by childhood memories. Memories that cruelly guard his past and nurture a present of unconfessable secrets. His father, a renowned psychologist (portrayed in home films by Michael Powell), provoked suffering and fears never afterward annihilated in the fragile soul of young Mark: from his first steps, his father's camera eye scrutinized and observed his growth, stimulated his nightmares and insecurities. An innocent laboratory subject, the unaware object of senior Lewis's scientific attention. Every moment of little Mark, every intimate or embarrassing instant was an analytical test under the lens of father A.N. Lewis. The discreet and gentle photographer/operator never leaves without his handheld camera. He feels defenseless and naked, without that cold, surgical eye pointed at the world. An extension of himself and his limbs.
It's not enough for Mark to capture surprise or complicity with his camera from the gazes of the women he films at night with care. No, he wants something else: the obscene representation of death 'live', the horror painted on those desperate and frozen faces in an atrocious grimace of pain. Our 'Peeping Tom', in fact, films the victims he kills with the sadistic act of recording them. He creates the ideal shot in his mind, adds some details to the 'scenery' around, and at the end of his tripod, he draws out a blade that will penetrate the throats of the poor women (often prostitutes or unknown actresses). A slow agony, made even more extreme and violent by the mirror fixed on the camera's lens; so that the victim is forced to literally look into the 'deformed' reflection of their own terror at the point of death. In short, Mark Lewis is a serial killer with evident Freudian psychological disturbances. In the darkness of the darkroom, he loves to develop his own perversions and life paranoias, to exorcize them in an absurd daily vision in the living room. Where Mark watches impassively and mechanically at his brief 'films' of pure and chilling terror, kept in the room next to his father's films and books. And the illusion of a tender friendship with a young neighbor, Helen (Anna Massey), renting with her intuitive blind mother Mrs. Stephens, will serve little purpose.
Michael Powell, the great English director (with Hungarian Emeric Pressburger) of immortal masterpieces like 'A Matter of Life and Death', 'Black Narcissus', and 'The Red Shoes', drags us into an atmosphere of sick voyeurism in his amazing cursed cult: 'Peeping Tom' (the British definition of 'voyeur'). An obsessive and melancholic vortex, where we are inevitably 'accomplices' and victims of violence not only endured but perpetrated. Because, unlike the spectator authorized to 'spy' on others on the screen, in 'Peeping Tom' the concept of the gaze detached from context is repeatedly violated by 'seeing' the terrifying spectacle of the 'shorts' projected by Mark Lewis. The camera, akin to an orgiastic ritual, an anguishing phallic substitute that in the hands of protagonist Karl Boehm (first known for 'Sissi') penetrates the 'virgin' gaze of what lies ahead, and of the audience.
Released in England in '60, 'Peeping Tom' stayed in theaters for a very short time due to foolish controversies over the alleged 'immorality' of the film, from critics. And it concluded the glorious career of Powell, probably the most important filmmaker who lived on British soil: in the Seventies, the film would be the subject of rediscovery and new artistic life, thanks also to Scorsese (who featured it in a showcase in New York), Coppola, and Brian De Palma. They have never hidden their admiration for such a masterpiece, for the courage to tackle unexplored and taboo topics. A work of lucid, perverse madness wrapped in the red blood of Otto Heller's saturated photography.
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