Bemoaning how TV had cheapened him, a corpulent Alfred Hitchcock is on the set of what would become his most famous and successful film, Psycho. It’s an ironic touch to a lively movie that’s playfully bookended with a nod to his equally playful TV series: one that sets the tone for much of what follows. Fleshed out with intelligent wit and style, there’s a knowingness to Hitchcock of which the master himself would have no doubt approved.

Against a making-of-the-film backdrop, Hitchcock is the love story between an iconic, woman-eating director (Anthony Hopkins) and his resolute wife and business partner Alma Reville (Helen Mirren). Enthralled with Robert Bloch’s page-turning thriller about a psychotic, transvestite mummy’s boy, Hitch remortgages the mansion (distributer Paramount was unenthusiastic about the project and refused to back him), and heads into production.

From under mostly successful prosthetics, Hopkins achieves the hulking presence of Hitchcock while occasionally channelling the voice of Michael Caine. It’s an interesting result. Comparisons with My Week With Marilyn are inevitable and find Hitchcock wanting. Where Michele Williams grasped the inner turmoil of Monroe’s outwardly successful life, Hopkins’ Hitchcock remains cool, aloof, theatrical. There’s little innate sense of the blonde-bashing demon the director was known to be, nor of the nagging self-doubt at which this film only hints.

Yet free from the shackles of distracting legend, Mirren creates Alma as the formidable, talented and devout woman-behind-the-man presence she undoubtedly was. Toni Collette as Hitchcock’s secretary and Danny Huston as an irksome writer lend weight around the story’s edges. Hitchcock adds up to a bright (the shower-scene at Psycho’s premiere is brilliant), if not particularly deep entertainment which resolves as an energetic, entertaining tale of a genius at work, and the unshakable bond that gave him the power to do his best work.

// COLIN FRASER

Previewed at Events Cinemas, Fox Studios, Sydney on Tuesday 6 November 2012
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