Often, the success of horror movies and thrillers depends on the twist factor: if it’s clever, it can make a good movie legendary; if it’s contrived, then it can leave audiences angry; and if it’s spoiled, it can make you not want to see the movie at all. The relative paucity of decent movie twists amid reams of clichéd (e.g., “It was only a dream!”) and WTF-for-WTF’s-sake endings illustrates how hard it can be to pull them off. As a result, filmmakers (especially screenwriters) have to carefully pace the clues so that the audience doesn’t puzzle out the twist in advance, yet the twist still has some basis in the rest of the movie.
Brian De Palma’s 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill is a bit of an exception to this rule. I figured out whodunit fairly early during the movie (I’d say about halfway), and this actually made the movie more exciting. I usually don’t try to guess the end of a movie; I prefer to be taken along for the ride. But De Palma’s hints to the killer’s identity that are planted throughout the movie are more like giant flashing arrows to film buffs, especially those familiar with the genre.
(WARNING: Some mild spoilers ahead for a 29-year-old movie.)
First, De Palma often borrows from Alfred Hitchcock, from recycling the master’s themes to quoting specific camera shots. But Dressed to Kill’s riffing on Psycho is perhaps the biggest swipe of them all. Once I figured out that De Palma was using Angie Dickinson as a MacGuffin in the same way as Hitchcock used Janet Leigh in Psycho, I started making the connection. The parallels come fast and quick, from the memorable shower sequence, to the reveal of the villain, to the explanatory epilogue with a psychiatrist spouting Freudian psychobabble. But while Hitchcock hid the killer’s motivation until the closing scenes, here De Palma places it front and center throughout the movie. Michael Caine’s character, a psychiatrist, treats patients with gender issues, while Nancy Allen’s character watches an interview on TV with a post-surgery M-to-F transsexual.
Second, De Palma sticks to one of the principal rules of the genre, which Roger Ebert has termed the Law of Conservation of Characters: “Any main character whose purpose is not readily apparent must be more important than he or she seems.” I’ll add to that my Law and Order corollary: if a recognizable actor is playing a part that’s smaller than you’d expect, then he or she will be the culprit.
I would have still appreciated Dressed to Kill if the ending had been a total surprise. But by letting viewers employ their knowledge of movies (which is typically useless, at least in my case), De Palma creates a subtext that leads to a richer enjoyment of the film. I was biting my nails to whole time trying to figure out how the killer would be revealed, and every interaction with that character took on a sinister bent that would have otherwise been absent. (There’s also the fun of playing spot-the-movie-reference.) With Dressed to Kill, De Palma succeeded at the tricky task of making a film that serves both as a tight mainstream thriller and as an homage to thrillers in general, Hitchcock in particular.
Look, Sally, Look 