Robert Altman's near-masterpiece, a rare and underseen horror film dealing with identity, mental illness, and voyeurism
Directed by: Robert Altman
How had I never
heard of this movie before seeing it? I've been sifting through lists of the
creepiest movies, scariest movies, greatest horror movies, most underrated
horror movies, etc., since I was the age of 16, and never once did I see Robert Altman's
Images on a single list. The only reason I found it was because Altman's
3 Women (1977) is one of my favorite movies of all time, and while
searching his name on Prime Video a few years back, I stumbled upon this entry I
was entirely unfamiliar with. I had no idea the audacious and innovative New
Wave director had ever created a genre film, and I dove down the rabbit hole
headfirst without hesitation. My mind was absolutely blown. How
had I never heard of this movie before seeing it?
Images isn't quite the
criterion-level masterpiece that 3 Women is, but it's every bit the surreal, nerve-racking,
mind-bending metaphysical nightmare. It tells the story of the flighty and
distracted Cathryn, an eternally daydreaming children's author living with
schizophrenia. After a night of harassment from strange phone calls and a disturbing
hallucination, Cathryn and her husband Hugh escape to their second home, a secluded
cottage in the idyllic Irish countryside. A quiet, scenic locale of rolling
hills, cascading waterfalls, mossy stones, and tufts of late-autumn trees; spotted with dark pools of sapphire blue; swallowed in emerald greens and earthy browns, with shades of orange, auburn, and golden yellow. For Hugh, it's a place for sport;
for hunting pheasant and other beasts to stuff and photograph and mount on the
walls like trophies. Activities that appear to crawl under the skin of the more
nature-sensitive Cathryn.
As for her, it's a place of mystical wonder; inspiration
for her stories of mythical creatures in magical lands far removed from the
mundanities of everyday life. However, the cottage and seemingly peaceful environment also accelerate her mental deterioration.
Ripping open half-scarred lacerations and memories of infidelity, unstitching
the past and conjuring ghosts of lovers dead or alive to haunt her and hound
her as they mesh themselves into her current reality. Beset by doppelgängers
and apparitions, chained to daydreams that yank her in and thrust her out of
lucidity on a whim like a disorienting whirlwind, tormented by delirium-inducing
memories that merge past and present, giving face to fears she thought were
long dead – destabilized, Cathryn's self and psyche fray, and a tragic
unraveling begins.
Throughout Images, we hear voiceovers
as Cathryn internally develops the story for the children's book she's writing:
little snippets that always seem to take a dark turn and reflect her own state of mind. They're meta-narrations within the understated meta-narrative of the
film. During Cathryn's opening monologue, she describes a tree that's thrashing
about, even though there's no wind - as if it's possessed. As she's tearing up
rejected draft pages, Cathryn says of the tree, "Deep sobbing poured from its
trunk, as if some locked creature was struggling to escape." On repeat viewings, it feels like a fitting analogy for Cathryn's own inescapable struggles with mental
illness. A private battle that outsiders can only observe on the surface, and
only those living with can truly understand the extent of.
Altman's meta-narrative reveals itself most evidently
in his camera's fixation on cameras – and more importantly, as the title suggests, the images
they record and present. During the opening scene, as a disembodied voice floats through
the phone lines mocking Cathryn, goading her to believe that her husband is cheating
on her, the camera glides over scattered lenses and photography equipment. And at
various points, Altman also seems to purposefully draw a parallel between
shooting with a gun and shooting with a camera, intrinsically linking the latter with the violence of the former, such as when Hugh photographs the decapitated head of a wild goat he killed.
In the earlier parts of the film, Hugh's camera is set on a
tripod, nearly always pointed towards Altman's camera when on screen, confronting the viewer. It has a
sort of metaphysical omnipresence in many scenes, always staring, always
watching Cathryn as she lashes out in confused fits of rage. Always seeming to
record the audience's reaction to these events, returning our complicit gaze
back to us. During a particularly intense exchange with one of her
hallucinations, Cathryn shoots the non-existent man that appears before her
with Hugh's shotgun. Behind the apparition, Hugh's camera explodes in a
flurry of shrapnel – destroying one of the house's omnipresent eyes that watch her pain with cold, unsympathetic detachment. The
other eye is Altman's own voyeuristic camera, which Cathryn seems to have an
awareness of as well. After many of her worst outbursts, she'll stare directly
into the camera – back at us – sometimes smirking, as if to ask, "Are you
entertained by my suffering?" The horror genre commenting on the nature of
violence and the audience's passive participation in (and potential
pleasure derived from) the suffering of the characters within the films is
nothing new, but Altman presents the commentary in a more unique and
nuanced way than I've seen before.
Another possible interpretation could be that
Altman is having a dialogue with himself in Images. The existential
horror of identity within an inherently meaningless existence frequently appears in his works, so Cathryn may be a stand-in for himself and his own struggles
with identity, and her ocular attacks may symbolize his own feelings of complicity and
guilt in creating violence and suffering on screen. In the earlier parts of the
film, Cathryn's plaguing doppelgänger typically appears at a distance,
disconnected, but watching the events unfold, perhaps even metaphysically engineering them - like a filmmaker. And before she shoots
the hallucination of her deceased paramour in the kitchen as he stands in front
of Hugh's photo camera, the specter says to her, "You want me dead? Make me
dead" - like a writer penning in the execution of a fated character.
I'd be remiss not to mention John Williams's
harrowing score as well. And yes, I'm talking about that John Williams. The
52-time Oscar nominee (5 wins) and 72-time Grammy nominee (25 wins) John
Williams, who composed the immortal scores for such franchises as Jaws, Star
Wars, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, and Harry Potter.
His unconventional use of instruments in Images creates a menacing
unease, with the plucking, screeching strings, droning alien ambience, and abrasively
percussive drums mixing in with phantom chimes and uncanny flute melodies. It's
hard to tell whether the aggressive explosions of noise or the eerie softness
of the ghostly wind instruments is more unsettling – but it all works perfectly
to clue us into Cathryn's troubled and fragmenting mental states throughout
the film.
A fair critique could be made that Images
adds to the stigmatization that people living with schizophrenia are a danger
to others, but I think the film is ultimately able to elicit more empathy than
fear or judgment during its run-time. It shows Cathryn's frustration as she's
aware of what's happening to her but unable to stop it. It shows her distress
at not being able to trust the people around her; the horror of not being able
to trust herself and her own experiences. We see how it manifests in the
crossed wires of communication when surrounded by people who can't be bothered
to notice the savage, disjointed hurricane inside her mind as her sense of
reality fractures repeatedly, smashed against the rocks. We see the tragic
conclusion as she goes untreated, uncared for, and unsupported by those closest
to her, abandoned and left to spiral into the darkest depths of her own
personal hell. Like all of Altman's work, Images defies easy
classification and often transcends classification entirely. Whether watched as
a psychological horror film, a meta-commentary on the audience's relationship
to violence, or a surreal, existential domestic drama about the alienation of mental illness,
like its main character, Images deserves to be seen, heard, and understood.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures / Arrow Academy / MGM Home Entertainment
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