By Stephanie Sack
(Editor’s Note: Stephanie Sack will share her film clips periodically with readers, including Robert Altman’s Images offered by the Siskel Film Center Wednesday, June 25, 6:00 p.m. and Saturday, June 28, 2:00 p.m. as part of the celebration of the singular director’s centennial of his birth.)
Overlooked, misunderstood, and rarely screened, Robert Altman’s Images is a haunting psychological thriller that blends fractured identity, eerie atmosphere, and violent surrealism in a way that echoes his European contemporaries — only filtered through Altman’s distinctly American lens. It’s a film of mirrors, doubles, and emotional disintegration, where sanity slips through the cracks and nothing is quite what it seems.
Emerging from his early 1970s creative high, Images arrived between McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, a period when Altman was deconstructing American genre films with a mix of experimental looseness and formal precision. Yet unlike the ironic detachment of his more masculine ensembles, Images is interior, intimate, and unsettlingly feminine.
With Susannah York delivering a fearless performance as a woman unraveling in real time, Images is less concerned with solving a mystery than immersing us in the sensation of coming undone. Altman’s camera lingers not on spectacle, but on subjectivity, rendering female psychological distress not as a plot device, but as an existential state. It’s a rare and radical depiction of womanhood as fragmented, haunted, and deeply vulnerable to the forces of memory, repression, and perception.
Images premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where York won the Best Actress prize. A young John Williams received an Academy Award nomination for his chilling original score.
For those who seek out the quieter corners of American thrillers, it’s a must-see on the big screen, and a revelatory entry in both Altman’s career and the wider canon of psychologically driven horror.
