Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972)

Frenzy is the most violent and brutal movie that Hitchcock has ever made in his long career. It has nudity inside and not to say a morbid nudity and it comes as a movie that says a pretty deranged story, that of a tie strangler. Frenzy is a movie that really captures the sick character of the murderer, it has that characteristic of getting you inside his mind and his disturbed nature. Although the killer is not the protagonist, is definitely the character who makes the biggest impression to the spectator and he is the one that is the centre of the movie. Frenzy is one of those films that use a highly macabre story and they picture it most vividly taking the spectator on a ride that is most entertaining. There is that feeling while you are watching the movie that a window has been opened and you are the biggest peeping tom and you are observing the brutal murders of the strangler. There is that sense, that secrecy that makes you an accessory to the killings, it makes you more than a spectator. You have seen the ugliness, you know, you are not like the others who live in the dark. Frenzy works like a disturbing thriller. That is its goal. To make you feel bad. There is that thriller element that makes the journey even more painful and the quality of the movie speaks about a film that stays an exercise in ugliness. The tie strangler is here and nobody knows when he is hitting again. Nobody except you, who you live inside the story. You live inside his disturbed mind. You live to watch his heinous acts.

Frenzy is quite an effective movie. The way that it is made, the scenes where the strangler performs his murders are definitely scenes that have something vibrant, something totally vivid. They get inside you and you cannot escape them, you are left with the nightmare to cope with. But there is no coping with those images, the more you think about them, the more they become a nightmare. The topless woman with her throat strangled will follow you for the whole duration of the movie. There is no way to escape the fear. There is no way to escape the morbid images. There is no way to escape his evil nature. He is the master of the movie. He is the puppeteer of the movie. The tie strangler is the guy who will come so near you that you will feel his breath. And in that way the film turns really effective. It turns really vivid. It turns to a living nightmare. Hitchcock made a movie that for his standards was out of line. He made a movie that he surpassed his own persona. He made a movie that is sick and deranged as hell. And we are staying here and we observe that movie with eyes fixed on the screen. The tie strangler will hit again... soon.