"What if someone good made a horror picture?" asks Alfred Hitchcock of his wife Alma Reville early on in Sacha Gervasi's clever and witty drama about the making of Psycho. Psycho was itself the film that so emphatically answered that question in 1960 and the story of its creation – based on Stephen Rebello's enthralling 1990 account, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, and scripted by John McLaughlin – is at heart the story of a marriage, between a fat, ugly genius and the "tiny, birdlike woman" who was invigilator, confidante and touchstone to his talent.
Played here by Anthony Hopkins, in facial prosthesis and fake belly, and the neither tiny nor particularly birdlike Helen Mirren, Hitch and Alma appear as an indissoluble partnership in art and life, suddenly threatened by pressures from without (no budget) but more from within, particularly by Alfred's tendency, now tiresome to the red-haired Alma, to become obsessed with his leading blondes.
The film opens with Hitchcock speaking directly to us, Alfred Hitchcock Presents … style. He's just enjoyed the huge success of North by Northwest and is at a loose end for projects. Offered Cary Grant in Casino Royale, he reminds his assistant Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette): "I just made that movie." His ears prick up, however, when he encounters Robert Bloch's Freudian gore-transvestite-incest-necrophilia shocker Psycho, which horrifies everyone he shows it to, but which might give him the edge he needs in his private war with French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose Les Diaboliques has critics talking of "French Hitchcocks" and similar rot.
But Paramount won't back it, and the Hitchcocks are driven back on their own resources, and into one another's company. We see them in domestic harmony, 34 years married, Alfred in the bath reading the Times, and Alma clad in the same white bra and slip that Janet Leigh will wear in Psycho's opening sequence. Alma has the epicurean Hitchcock on a diet and one senses trouble in paradise. The film essentially tells us how their marriage suffers until she, in a magisterial, bark-stripping tirade, finally reminds him of her indispensable role in his success: "I was once your boss!"
The device that speeds along the estrangement of the partnership is the movie's weakest invention, a screenwriting project with another writer (Danny Huston), a fool and a hack in Hitch's eyes. But one should treat that like a McGuffin – a plot engine – forget that the middle section sags a little, and enjoy the ride. The making of Psycho is depicted in detail without our seeing one frame of the completed movie. The closest we come is when Hitchcock stands in the lobby outside the premiere, faux-conducting Bernard Hermann's slashing violins; he has a combination of a maestro's manual flourishes and a murderer's manic stabbing motions as the audience inside wails and howls its way through the shower scene. It's a magnificent moment for anyone who can blink-sync their way through those infamous 45 seconds, and beautifully brought off by Hopkins, who hasn't had this much fun in years.
All the smaller roles are neatly filled, particularly Scarlett Johansson's Leigh and James Darcy's Tony Perkins, the latter almost eerily resembling the original; plus Kurtwood Smith as the fuming head of the censor's office and Ralph Macchio as screenwriter Joseph Stephano. But it lives and breathes through Hopkins and Mirren. Unlike Toby Jones's Hitch in The Girl, which physically and vocally evoked the director very convincingly, Hopkins relies, as with his Nixon, on a few tics, some prosthetic fakery, and just lives the man, pink, pale, blinking and blimpish, held up by iron certainty in his own talents.
Mirren matches him, though, despite a slightly thankless and less rounded role to which she brings all her heft and leverage; finally, however, she is the film's – hell, both films' – secret heroine. Forget all those blondes – count on the redhead.
