“We all go a little mad sometimes.”

I went into Psycho not knowing much about the actual story, but I did, both obviously and unfortunately, know about the two most famous scenes in the movie. I didn’t even know the central premise of it beforehand, but it essentially is about this woman who wants to start a fresh and new life, and winds up at a very odd and unsettling motel. Considering that I’ve had a hard time fully appreciating movies I’ve watched that were made pre-1970s, I wasn’t sure that I was going to fully enjoy this one, but I honestly really did.

Before I really dive deep into my review, I think that it’s important to recognize how influential this film really is. Not only is it held up as a classic and one of the most famous directors of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s best work, but it also essentially started an entirely new subgenre. It was one of the first true slasher horror movies, and at the very least, the one that really made the subgenre mainstream in horror movie culture. It was also a surprisingly effective horror movie considering the time it was made.

Now, this film is pretty much a masterclass in mystery and tension. It doesn’t take long for odd things to start happening before we even get to the motel, and the unsettling feeling I got that lasted throughout most of the film started pretty early on. Sure, a lot of the mystery stuff is pretty cliche now, but for the time, there’s no way it wasn’t revolutionary. It gets you to ask so many interesting questions that even I, living in a world over six decades after this film came out, had a hard time guessing at. As I stated before, I already knew about the two most famous scenes, which happen to be the two biggest reveals, but the movie still managed to surprise me on many different occasions, and even then, the big reveals still had a really big impact on my viewing experience. I didn’t expect the first act/section of the movie to end the way it did, and where it went from there, I certainly didn’t expect at all.

Another thing definitely worth highlighting is Anthony Perkins’ performance. Holy cow, I was not expecting such an incredible performance. I haven’t seen many “olden day” movies, but the ones I have seen, the acting really hasn’t aged well, even if it was really good for the time. Perkins’ Norman Bates truly does stand the test of time in every aspect that there is of acting. It’s creepy, it’s unsettling, and it’s completely believable. It almost kind of has a negative side to it, too, because his acting way outperforms anyone else here. I’m sure many people who haven’t seen Psycho already know about the nature of his character, but where he goes towards the end is the peak of this.

I was a big fan of the score, which also really surprised me. It’s probably used in a way that is a little emotionally manipulative, where it adds tension to scenes that otherwise wouldn’t otherwise have any, instead of enhancing scenes that should already have tension, but it’s still effective nonetheless. It definitely is used well, though, in the big reveal moments, making the shock factor spike up like crazy.

Despite my really enjoying this classic horror film overall, I definitely do have two criticisms. The first one is that none of the characters, other than Norman Bates, really have any depth to them at all. They aren’t very interesting, and they aren’t deep enough to get you to care about them during the film’s most intense scenes, even if the scenes are still just as intense. It doesn’t kill the movie for me, and is honestly probably a bit of a nitpick, but it still stuck out to me anyway.

The one big criticism that definitely held this back from being great for me, though, was the plot structure. This could be a thing of the time, but I found the way the plot was organized to be quite weird and made for some really whacky pacing at times. The first act is really long for some reason, the middle act is really long (which is normal), and then the third act is oddly short, which is unfortunate because it was easily, by far, the highlight for me, and what I think makes this movie so famous. What made the plot structure a problem for me is that the middle act, to put it bluntly, just wasn’t very good at all. The movie completely took a plunge with its pacing, and it felt like it lacked a sense of direction or urgency.

I was actually a bit on the fence during the middle act, especially towards the end of it, but the third act really did come in and save the movie for me despite how short it was. It went back to what I liked about the first act with the mystery and tension, but this time, it went full throttle. There was a shocking amount of suspense that really had me on the edge of my seat until the very final scene, and the reveals, again for the last time, though I already knew them, made for a pretty impactful resolution. The final scene that sort of summed up everything was also probably one of the best uses of exposition I’ve ever come across in a film. It wasn’t just simply telling the characters stuff so that the audience understood what happened, but it made the mysterious aspects come full circle in a really interesting and surprising way.

So, do I think Psycho warrants being called one of the greatest horror movies of all time? Maybe not for me, but for the sake of movie history, definitely yes.