Images (film)

Wealthy children's author Cathryn receives a series of disturbing phone calls in her home in London one dreary night; the female voice on the other end, sometimes cutting in on other phone conversations, suggests mockingly that her husband Hugh is having an affair. Hugh comes home, finding Cathryn in distress. As Hugh attempts to comfort her, Cathryn witnesses a different man who is behaving as if he were her husband. She screams in horror and backs away, only to see her vision of the figure revert to her husband.

Hugh attributes her outburst to stress and her pregnancy. He decides to take her on a vacation to an isolated cottage in the Irish countryside, where Cathryn can work on her book and take photographs for its illustrations. Immediately upon her arrival, however, Cathryn hears voices saying her name and sees strange apparitions: While preparing lunch one day, she sees her husband Hugh pass through the kitchen, then transform into her dead lover, Rene. Rene continues to appear to her around the house, and even speaks with her.

Cathryn's paranoia and visions become increasingly pervasive, and are exacerbated when a local neighbor and ex-lover, Marcel, brings his adolescent daughter, Susannah, to visit. Cathryn becomes unable to distinguish Hugh from Rene or Marcel, as the men shift before her eyes. One day, Rene taunts Cathryn, asking her to kill him if she wants rid of him, and hands her a shotgun. She shoots him through the abdomen; Susannah, startled by the gunshot, runs into the house, and finds Cathryn standing in the den, having shot Hugh's camera to pieces. Cathryn claims the gun accidentally fired when she was moving it.

Seeking solace, Cathryn goes to a nearby waterfall, where she often sees her doppelgänger staring back at her. After one such occurrence, she returns to the house, where Hugh tells her he has to leave for business. She drives him to the train station and returns to the house, where she finds Marcel waiting inside. He begins to undress to have sex with her, but she stabs him through the chest with a kitchen knife. The next morning, she encounters a local elderly man walking his dog, and invites him to come inside for coffee, in spite of the fact that Marcel's corpse apparently lies in the living room (which suggests that she regards the "murder" as a hallucination, like her shooting of Rene); the old man declines the invitation. Later in the evening, Susannah stops by the house, and remarks that her father was not at home when she awoke that morning. Cathryn is alarmed by this, as it could mean that she really did kill Marcel. She is relieved to hear that Marcel did return drunk after midnight, and invites Susannah in for a cup of tea after reasoning that Marcel cannot be dead on her living room floor. Susannah asks Cathryn if she looked like her when she was young before ominously saying, "I'm going to be exactly like you."

After having tea, Cathryn drives Susannah back home. Marcel comes out of the house and attempts to talk to Cathryn, but she drives away. While on a stretch of road through a desolate field, Cathryn witnesses her doppelgänger again, attempting to wave her down. Back at the house, she finds both Rene and Marcel's corpses have reappeared in the living room. Cathryn leaves again, and encounters her doppelgänger at a bend in the road; this time she stops. The doppelgänger begs Cathryn to let her into the car, and the two begin to speak in unison. She then hits the doppelgänger with the car, throwing her off a cliff and into a waterfall below. Cathryn then drives back to her home in London. At her home, she goes to take a shower. While in the bathroom, the door opens, and the doppelgänger walks inside. Cathryn screams in terror, "I killed you," to which the doppelgänger responds, "Not me." Hugh's corpse is then shown lying at the bottom of the falls.

The film's loose narrative structure and ambiguities have led to numerous readings of it from film scholars. Joe McElhaney suggests in A Companion to Robert Altman, the majority of film critics and scholars have tended to note that Altman's 3 Women (1977) was inspired directly by Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), but, according to McElhaney, Altman himself claimed to have been more influenced by the film when writing and directing Images five years prior.[5] In a retrospective interview, Altman attested to this, saying: "What I see becomes personal, so I am as involved in the fabric of those films [with smaller casts] as I am in the others. The difference between those films with many, many characters and small films like Images and 3 Women is just the size of the canvas. Some are small paintings, whereas others are big, broad murals."[6]

Filmmaker Louis Lombardo has read the character of Cathryn as a stand-in figure for Altman himself, and the film thus an exploration of the multi-dimensional creative process.[7] In 1982's American Skeptic: Robert Altman's Genre-Commentary Films by Norman Kagan, he cites the film as an "anti-genre exploration of what might be called the theme of madness. This genre includes such critically revered films as Psycho, Repulsion, and Persona."[8] Writer Frank Caso identified themes of the film as including obsession, schizophrenia and personality disorder, and linked the film to Altman's earlier film That Cold Day in the Park (1969) and his later 3 Women, declaring them a trilogy.[9]

Images premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1972, and was released theatrically in November in the United Kingdom by Hemdale. The film was distributed by Columbia Pictures in the United States, premiering in New York City on December 18, 1972.[14] The film's theatrical runs in both countries were short-lived; Hemdale reportedly pulled its advertising campaign from circulation in the United Kingdom, and its distribution in the United States was minimal.[10] In an interview with Variety, Altman lambasted Hemdale for what he saw as their failure to properly promote the film, and criticized the company's head, John Daley.[15]

• Mental disorders in film
• Surrealism

• Images at IMDb
• Images at AllMovie
• Images at the American Film Institute Catalog