Images

Against the backdrop of the beautiful Irish landscape, a writer confronts the demons in her head. Nestled between two of Altman's masterpieces, "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" in 1971 and "The Long Goodbye" in 1973, is this pretentious nonsense from 1972. This is a common trend with Altman, whose films veer from the sublime to the ridiculous. In this, as in "Three Women," Altman seems to be doing a bad Ingmar Bergman impersonation. The script (by Altman and York) and direction are both indulgent and tedious, not to mention the annoying story that York is working on that we are subjected to passages from; the weird score does not help.

This is one of the most compelling films I've seen in a long time. I wasn't sure if I was in the mood for a serious "psychological thriller" but this movie held my rapt attention until the very end. A brilliant example of just how talented Robert Altman is as a filmmaker. While most people pigeonhole him as "that guy who makes the movies with the large ensemble casts and lots of overlapping dialogue", this movie finds him working with a cast of six, and most of the action takes place within the heroine's head. Beautiful (of course) photography by Vilmos Zsigmond is just the icing on the cake. Don't miss this forgotten treasure by an American master.

This film does not represent what Altman is well-known for - community mosaic or documentary style films such as "MASH", "Nashville", and "A Prairie Home Companion". Instead, Altman extended what he tried in "That Cold Day In the Park (1969)" depicting the inner world of a psychopathic woman, but his approach here is more complex. In fact, the fragmented style of the film is quite appropriate to portrait the shuttered mind of heroine. The use of sound and the twin image of the character somewhat reminded me of "Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)" by Maya Deren. However, the visual style of this film is distinctively the seventies - beautifully shot by Vilmos Zsigmond. A mesmerizing film.

Images is a disorienting and hallucinatory experiment in psychological horror, in which the audience is forced to share in the protagonist's confusion. In order to depict the world from her perspective, the camera becomes an unreliable narrator. The film is full of jarring editing: jumps and overlaps in time and abrupt changes in the actors in the scene. Its soundscape is a deliberate combination of realism and expressionist experience, including a recurring voiceover of the fantasy story the protagonist is writing in her head and a contrasting musical score that shifts suddenly from melodic to jangling, percussive, and eerie. Unlikely to appeal to everyone, Images is a conceptually terrifying film, effective in its execution.