Robert Altman, that beloved patron saint of sprawling ensembles, gave us the chaotic brilliance of M*A*S*H, the glorious mess of Nashville, and the woozy paranoia of The Long Goodbye. Then, for reasons known only to him (and possibly to his therapist), he decided to make a horror film. The result was Images (1972), his one and only venture into psychological terror—a movie that manages to make schizophrenia seem less like a descent into madness and more like a very long, very dull art exhibition curated by someone who’s just discovered Bergman.
In short: Repulsion by Polanski had teeth. Persona by Bergman had fire. Images has… Susannah York wandering around an Irish cottage muttering “I killed you” to men who keep reappearing like bad dinner guests.
The Plot, Such As It Is
York plays Cathryn, a children’s author who receives unsettling phone calls suggesting her husband Hugh (René Auberjonois) is cheating on her. Already fragile, she decamps with him to an isolated cottage in County Wicklow where, naturally, the voices and apparitions intensify. Dead lovers materialize. Doppelgängers lurk by waterfalls. Hugh morphs into her ex Rene, then into her ex-ex Marcel. Sometimes Cathryn shoots someone, sometimes she stabs someone, and sometimes she just stares at her own reflection as if it owes her money.
By the climax, she’s run over her husband—thinking he was her spectral double—and driven back to London, only to find the doppelgänger in her bathroom anyway. Cue screaming. Cue credits. Cue audience wondering if this was art, horror, or just Altman seeing how far he could push Columbia Pictures before they pulled the plug.
The Altman “Touch”
Altman described Images as one of his “small paintings” rather than one of his “big murals.” The problem is that this painting looks less like a Van Gogh and more like a child’s finger-painting left out in the rain. The sparse script—half notes, half improvisation—leaves actors stranded in fields of ambiguity.
Where Altman’s overlapping dialogue and narrative sprawl usually create life, here they create fog. The story isn’t ambiguous so much as incoherent. Characters appear, disappear, reappear, die, resurrect, and vanish again. By the third hallucination, the audience is no longer unsettled—it’s just checking watches and counting sheep.
Susannah York: Saint of the Impossible
To her credit, Susannah York does everything humanly possible with the material. She plays Cathryn as brittle, wounded, alternately childlike and feral. She even wrote and read aloud the children’s book excerpts used in the film, because apparently Altman thought that would be a fun psychological flourish. For this, she won Best Actress at Cannes.
But even York’s haunted performance can’t disguise the fact that she’s acting inside a cinematic void. Watching her is like seeing a world-class violinist forced to perform in the middle of a laundromat while dryers tumble in the background.
The Men Who Weren’t There
René Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi, and Hugh Millais all play different iterations of Cathryn’s lovers—sometimes the husband, sometimes the ghost, sometimes the neighbor—until the audience is as confused as she is. Instead of chilling or provocative, the constant identity-swapping feels like bad improv: “You’re dead!” “No I’m not, I’m your husband!” “No, wait, I’m the neighbor with a knife!”
It doesn’t help that their personalities are indistinguishable, beyond “moody European male with sideburns.” By the time Cathryn stabs one of them with a kitchen knife, the audience is too numb to even flinch.
Horror Without Horror
For a supposed psychological horror, Images is startlingly dull. The hallucinations arrive with the regularity of a bus schedule. The murders, when they happen, have all the shock of spilled tea. The doppelgänger motif—Cathryn seeing herself at waterfalls and on winding roads—should be eerie. Instead, it feels like Altman is auditioning for a tourism board commercial: “Come to Ireland. See yourself by a lovely cascade.”
There is blood, yes. There are corpses, yes. But there is no fear, no tension, no atmosphere beyond moody Irish mist. Images doesn’t haunt. It plods.
The Score That Outshines the Film
John Williams, yes that John Williams, composed the score—an eerie, fragmented piece with harp, atonal strings, and dissonant piano. It’s unsettling, inventive, and far too good for the film it’s attached to. Listening to it without the movie is like enjoying fine wine while staring at a damp sponge.
Williams earned an Academy Award nomination, and rightly so. The music is the one thing in Images that actually unsettles. The rest is Altman patting himself on the back for being obscure.
Cannes: Where Anything Can Win
At Cannes, York took home Best Actress. This says less about her (who deserved the recognition) and more about Cannes, which has a long tradition of rewarding films that leave audiences scratching their heads and muttering “brilliant” out of sheer peer pressure. It’s the same logic that leads critics to describe incoherence as “dreamlike” and boredom as “meditative.”
Why It Fails
The problem with Images is not that it’s surreal or ambiguous. Persona is ambiguous. Repulsion is surreal. The problem is that Altman mistakes confusion for profundity. Rather than drawing us into Cathryn’s fractured psyche, he leaves us stranded outside it, watching a woman scream at thin air in lovely Irish scenery.
It’s not horror. It’s not even drama. It’s cinematic navel-gazing, disguised as genre.
The Accidental Comedy
Of course, no bad film is without its accidental charms. Watching Susannah York blast away at hallucinations, or stab men who may not exist, is so overwrought it edges into comedy. The repeated doppelgänger sightings—always near waterfalls and winding roads—become unintentional running gags. One almost expects the double to wave cheerfully and shout, “See you next hallucination!”
And when York shrieks, “I killed you!” only to hear, “Not me,” from her serene double in the bathroom, the audience can be forgiven for laughing instead of gasping.
Final Verdict: Altman’s “Small Canvas” Belongs in the Attic
Images is the cinematic equivalent of being cornered at a cocktail party by someone who insists on telling you about their dreams in excruciating detail. Yes, Susannah York is excellent. Yes, Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is pretty. Yes, John Williams’ score is unnervingly good. But none of it saves the film from its own self-importance.
Robert Altman wanted to prove he could do psychological horror. What he proved instead is that even geniuses have blind spots. For every Nashville, there is an Images. For every “big mural,” there is a canvas so small it should have stayed in the sketchbook.
If you want real psychological horror, stick to Polanski’s Repulsion or Bergman’s Persona. If you want to see Altman fail spectacularly, then by all means, watch Images. Just don’t expect to be haunted. Unless, of course, boredom counts as a hallucination.
