Mark Lewis (played amazingly well by Carl Boehm) is a focus puller at a film studio who, as a side gig, also takes provocative photos of women for money. The ladies find Mark cute but a bit aloof, not realizing that he holds a dark secret rooted in his childhood. Mark is a murderer of women. He kills them with a specially design camera tripod sharpened at one end that allows him to film his victims’ last agonizing contortions of fear before plunging the tripod blade into their chests. But soon Mark finds himself falling for a particular naive waif, unsuspecting of his psychotic tendencies. Can he resist his deep-seated impulses to capture the screams of horror of his beloved on film?

Released the same year as Psycho, where that film was knife plunging into the heart of horror films, shocking its audience into submission, Peeping Tom is a more subtle, disturbing film, worming its way beneath your skin in order to corrupt your heart from the inside out. While the knee-jerk reaction is to attempt to compare and contrast the two films (heck, I even guested on a podcast doing just that), beyond the obvious comparison of them both being about disturbed young men who feel compelled to kill beautiful women, the two films couldn’t be more different. Michael Powell, the director of Peeping Tom, was before this film primarily known for his technicolor masterpieces with fellow filmmaker Emeric Pressburger such as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. But with this film, he peels back the calm veneer of a shy but eager cameraman and photographer and diving headfirst into the cruel and bizarre psychoses that lie underneath. Through Mark’s camera lens, Powell makes us the audience an accomplice to his crimes. We see what he sees. This complicity could very well have been what led to Peeping Tom effectly stalling Powell’s career while the similarly themed Psycho across the pond proved to be a huge hit. While Hitchcock does place the audience in Norman’s Bates’ POV in a couple of instances, Psycho is more overtly Marion Crane’s story, not ours and not Norman’s. It is able to keep the horrific events at a comfortable distance while Powell demands we get as intimate as possible. The film is a masterwork of tension as illustrated in the incredibly staged sequence where Mark invites Vivian (Moira Shearer who had appeared in multiple Powell & Pressburger films prior to this) to the studio to do some amateur filming after hours. You can feel Mark struggling with his baser impulses while also giving in them and carefully staging the kill. From Carl Boehm’s brauvura performance to beautifully rich cinematography by Otto Heller (Richard III, The Ladykillers), Peeping Tom is more than worthy of being considered one of the greatest thrillers in cinema history.

Peeping Tom‘s new 4K transfer is a tremendous improvement over Criterion’s previous DVD release of the film. Heller’s lush cinematography is represented really well here with the colors popping like I’ve never seen them in any prior release. The detail is phenomenal as well. The grain is natively heavy as one would expect from a film from this time period but never feels too dense. The black levels are solid and there is no distortion or blemishes in the image whatsoever. What StudioCanal, who consulted with Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker on the transfer, has done is something to be proud of. The mono audio track also comes across very clean and clear with evidence of hissing or popping that plagues many older audio tracks. As expected of Criterion, we have a nice slate of extras to dig into. Ported from the previous Criterion DVD of Peeping Tom, we have an audio commentary with film scholar Laura Mulvey and the documentary “A Very British Psycho”. Both the Mulvey commentary as well as a commentary by film historian Ian Christie ported from the previous Optimum release are quite dense, somewhat dry film theory-heavy commentary tracks that can be a bit much for the casual film fan but will absolutely be engrossing for the more hardcore cinephile. Christie’s track does actually delve into quite a few details of the production history of the film though, so if you want to know more about the film’s origins and other behind-the-scenes type info, this commentary is the one to check out. “A Very British Psycho” is a really well put-together doc that is highly recommended if you want to learn more about the inception of the project and especially more on screenwriter Leo Marks and the process of getting it from page to screen. Also ported from the Optimum release, we have an intro by Martin Scorsese, an interview with Thelma Schoonmaker (long-time editor of Scorsese’s and wife of Michael Powell) and a featurette called “Eye of the Beholder” that in addition to interviews with prior-mentioned folks, we also get more info from Carl Boehm on the making of the film. New to this release is a featurette on the 2024 restoration to illustrate the pain-staking detail that went into getting the excellent image quality we seen on this UHD release.

I unabashedly love Peeping Tom, and what Criterion has delivered here is the absolute definitive version of a bonafide cinema classic.