Peeping Tom

Just as brilliant as I remembered. Peeping Tom is such a deeply unsettling, but strangely seductive, exploration of voyeurism, shadowy and suffocating interiors, and a feverish, entirely compulsive score by Mister Brian Easdale. It is all so bitterly, so uncomfortably feminist: women watched, commodified, photographed, etc, and yet, Michael Powell is most interested in what it means to be witnessed, what it means to be sensationalized. Mark’s pathology, his fascination with and weaponization of fear, becomes a gross, all-too-relevant metaphor: women posed and priced for male consumption. It is an unfamiliar violence from the film’s terror and mystery and bloodshed but a violence all the same, and the film implicates us for continuing to watch, to participate, however passively. Tragic. Nasty. Beautiful.