Peeping Tom, while not known to many (especially American moviegoers), is often hailed as the British version of Alfred Hitchcock's classic Psycho. While it has not received the same amount of cinematic attention as the latter, I believe that it deserves just as much praise. While certain plot points and elements from the two films can be obviously compared, this film stands on its own as an amazing drama/thriller for its time.
The plot of this film, while at times very cheesy, was easily the reason why a lot of people thought it was a cheap Psycho ripoff. Comparable elements include a handsome, solitary, young man who ran a family business (apartment building in this case), a complicated relationship with one of their parents, and a history of not treating women too kindly. While Hitchcock's film was about a recluse living with his mother and killing the woman that he had rented a room to, the titular character in Peeping Tom was a lot more social and outgoing. Mark Lewis, played by Karlheinz Böhm, had a side job of taking nude pictures of women for magazines and other publications. This gave him most of his exposure to women and also his devious desires. He had a lot of experience with working with women in his day job at the film studio, and so it was easy for him to pick out his next target. I feel like this evil urge might have also came from the lack of care from his father. His father was a scientist who did awful experiments and torturous things to Mark as a child, and his young mind was scarred forever. The lack of his mother also affected him as a child, because it made him feel like he needed to be in charge, especially when it came to working with the nude women. The writers of this film did a fantastic job of making us feel for Mark, however. Once he was in the relationship with Helen, played by Anna Massey, he vowed he would never hurt her or "put her on camera," which was his expression for murder. Even though we had spent the majority of the movie watching Mark film women just to kill them for his own pleasure, those scenes made me feel bad for Mark because he had finally found someone that understood him (kinda). This was the biggest emotional draw-in for me, which I very much appreciated.
The acting in this film was definitely not notable, to say the most. There were not very strong performances by any of the lead cast members, unlike this film's American counterpart. In summary, this film had mediocre performances at best and contained very little to no character development. The only development that I saw was in Mark after he had gone on his first date with Helen. He had started to feel true love, and while that didn't last very long, neither did Helen. Mark went right back to his killer ways before deciding to end his own life by puncturing himself with the knife end of his tripod. Besides the very little emotional growth that Mark experienced, none of the other characters experienced anything at all, not even a decent performance by the actors and actresses. There were so many parts that were very cheesy to watch and was easy to tell that the scene may have been rushed to film. Other than that, the portrayals of the people in the film were very dry, and all of the characters (who stayed alive anyways) did not change a bit, no matter their situation or circumstances.
Overall, Peeping Tom is a good film to watch for its historical significance and (almost) original storyline. While it pushed the boundaries of filmmaking around the same time as Psycho did, it just did not reach the same audience and reactions as Hitchcock did. This film has its moments, with some decent emotional building and great set design, but overall does not live up to its American counterpart.
My Rating: ★★★½
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