POP UP CINEMA BRIGHTON

Robert Altman is one of America's most influential directors and is almost single-handedly responsible for setting in motion a style that the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson, Richard Linklater, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Chloé Zhao and the Safdie Brothers would later directly ape. Right in the middle of the director's most critically acclaimed period, which would yield Americana classics like MASH*, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye and Nashville, Altman would take an unusual detour and create this rural British psychological horror film.

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This outlier in Altman's prolific career follows children's author Cathryn (Susannah York – They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) who, after receiving a series of unsettling phone calls at her London flat, decides she needs some time away from the city. Her husband Hugh whisks her away to his remote cottage in the Irish countryside in the hope that she can return to working on her upcoming book. But the isolation seems only to heighten Cathryn's sense of unease, as the world around her begins to fragment and reality appears to shatter into a confusing series of hallucinations involving her former lovers. A relaxing weekend in the country it is not!

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Lead actress York is brilliant as the sometimes terrified, often paranoid and frequently dissociated lead of the film, winning the Best Actress award at that year's Cannes Film Festival. York also co-wrote the script with Altman, creating a kaleidoscope of terror built around the central character's inner psyche. Rich in visual metaphor and thick with cinematic atmosphere, the film's disturbing, dream-like quality falls somewhere between Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Ingmar Bergman's Persona.

 

Despite sharing some DNA with other Altman explorations of troubled female psychology, like That Cold Day in the Park (1969) and 3 Women (1977), Images is a completely unique film in cinema history. The iconic cinematography of regular Altman collaborator Vilmos Zsigmond (the visual maestro behind Deliverance, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate and Blow Out) gives Images its haunting and sometimes visceral look. Even the ever-reliable comfort food of a John Williams score (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, E.T., etc.) becomes a suitably unsettling, one-of-a-kind artifact, with additional 'sounds' from Stomu Yamash'ta (best known for his musical pieces featured in The Man Who Fell to Earth).

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Psychologically and cinematically haunting and complex, this early-'70s puzzle-box movie is both chilling and fascinating. Daring, engaging and uncommon in its remote countryside-set horrors, Images is well worth experiencing on the big screen.

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