Dressed to Kill (1980)
Brian De Palma arrived at Dressed to Kill in 1980 already well-established as Hollywood's most devoted, and most forensically skilled, student of Alfred Hitchcock. He had spent the previous decade developing a body of work that wore its Hitchcock influences openly, from the split-screen paranoia of Sisters to the telekinetic horror of Carrie, and by the time Filmways Pictures and Cinema 77 Films backed this particular project, he was operating with the confidence of a director who knew exactly what kind of film he wanted to make. The result is a thriller that frames itself, quite consciously, as a love letter to Psycho, borrowing its structural audacity (a lead character dispatched with alarming speed), its preoccupation with voyeurism, and its talent for wrong-footing an audience that thinks it knows where the story is going. The premise is lean and efficient: a woman witnesses a violent murder in a New York lift, finds herself suspected by the police, and becomes the target of the actual killer. Simple on paper, but the execution is anything but.
De Palma wrote the screenplay himself, which matters here because the film's shape and its obsessions are entirely personal ones. There is no source novel to point to, no prior property to adapt. The whole thing is De Palma playing in a sandbox he built from memory of films he admired, and that directness of vision, for better and for worse, is all over the finished product. The cast assembled around the premise is well-chosen and credibly varied. Angie Dickinson carries the film's opening stretch with a performance that demands the audience's sympathy on very little dialogue. Michael Caine brings an unsettling ambiguity to his psychiatrist role, the kind of performance that repays a second viewing once you know where the film is heading. Nancy Allen, playing a Manhattan call girl who becomes the story's unlikely moral centre, holds the thriller's second half together with a wary, street-smart energy. Keith Gordon, as the murder victim's teenage son who takes it upon himself to solve the case, and Dennis Franz, as a detective suspicious of everyone, fill out an ensemble that feels polished but grounded, never cartoonish.
Cinematographer Ralf D. Bode shoots the film in a style that is lush and formally composed, favouring wide lenses that make Manhattan locations feel both busy and isolating. There is a consistent attention to reflected surfaces, glass and mirrors and polished floors, that reinforces the film's themes of perception and concealment without ever making the point too heavily. The editing by Gerald B. Greenberg is at its best in the film's extended set-piece sequences, where patience is everything. Greenberg had worked with De Palma before, having cut Carrie, and there is a shared understanding here of how long a moment of dread can be held before it tips over into something else entirely. The score by Pino Donaggio is worth attention in its own right. Donaggio, another recurring De Palma collaborator (he scored Carrie and would go on to Blow Out), writes in a register somewhere between lullaby and threat, strings that feel simultaneously romantic and unstable. It is the kind of score that does a lot of the film's emotional work quietly, from underneath.
There is a sequence in Dressed to Kill, a slow, near-wordless prowl that De Palma stretches out for minutes on end, complete with a lingering slow-motion push in on a single foot, that had me holding my breath the whole way through.
That is the thing about him: few directors alive build suspense as patiently, or as shamelessly, and he is one of my favourites for exactly that reason. Here he is essentially making his own Psycho, a 1980 thriller so openly indebted to Alfred Hitchcock that it plays as a flat-out tribute. I gave Psycho itself three and a half stars, and there is something fitting in De Palma's homage to it landing on the very same score for me.
The film does come with a serious caveat, and it would be wrong to skate past it. Dressed to Kill has drawn a lot of criticism, much of it fair, for an ignorant and badly dated treatment of trans identity, and anyone who finds that a dealbreaker will get no argument from me. My own take is that if you can watch it as a product of 1980, warts and all, there is a very accomplished thriller waiting underneath. That will not be everyone's position, and I understand exactly why.
The rest holds up nicely. Pino Donaggio's score complements it wonderfully, all silk and menace, and the suspense is built with a restraint a lesser director would have thrown away for cheap shocks. It is not top-tier De Palma, and I would reach for Blow Out or Scarface long before it, but as a piece of pure Hitchcockian craft it more than earns its keep. Three and a half stars, and proof that even mid-table De Palma beats most people's best.
Dressed to Kill sits in an interesting and slightly uncomfortable place in De Palma's filmography: ambitious enough to be worth serious discussion, flawed enough that the discussion always includes the same caveats. For anyone tracing De Palma's career through the early 1980s, it functions as a useful marker, a moment where his command of the camera and his willingness to court controversy were both at full stretch. I also reviewed The Untouchables, which shows a rather different face of the same director: more disciplined, more restrained, working within genre rather than against it. The two films together make for a reasonable sketch of what De Palma was and what he could be when he reined himself in. Whether Dressed to Kill earns the comparison to Hitchcock it so openly courts, or whether it simply reminds you how much harder Hitchcock actually worked to earn his effects, probably depends on the mood you're in and the patience you bring. It is, at minimum, a film that understands how suspense functions. That alone puts it ahead of most of the competition.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1980 | Watched: 2026-09-13
Trailer
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