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The key is Peer Gynt tinkling amid shrieks, the gift of "Morning Mood" and clocks for the unraveling psyche. (The horror borne in the land of Ibsen and Grieg flourishes in the new world, not "some snake pit in Norway" but an El Camino Real motel room.) The malevolent pediatrician who supposedly "took a swan dive into a fjord" in reality orchestrates experiments on kidnapped toddlers, the schizophrenic son follows in the family business with his imaginary sibling, a leather-clad sleazebag who handles the dirty deeds—John Lithgow plays all three plus a few more in a clammy tour de force perfectly keyed to the delirium of the mise en scène. The dreamer in the formulation is the restless wife (Lolita Davidovich) still longing for the hunky widower (Steven Bauer), the remembered New Year's Eve embrace is reflected in the betrayed flatliner's staring eyes. She's smothered like Desdemona and sunk like Marion Crane, only to jolt back as a drenched avenger glimpsed in the flickering security monitor. Fathers and sons and the anxiety of influence, Brian De Palma's ultimate utterance on the Hitchcock lineage: "I am what you made me, Dad." Playground frissons, oneiric impalements, Beckett's "rupture" multiplied. The best joke is the information dump courtesy of the cancer-stricken psychiatrist (Frances Sternhagen) followed by a couple of cops through M.C. Escher's police headquarters, a camera zigzagging-floating-tilting all the way down to the morgue for a close-up of the grimacing cadaver. Oedipal torments in a sustained swelling of hilarity, integers of derangement (blade and pistol, stroller and sundial) climactically pulled together by De Palma with a juggler's smiling concentration. "Be a Peeping Tom on your own time!" The coda offers a flash of the Cocteau hermaphrodite (Le Sang d'un Poète), the ideal pairing is with Cronenberg's The Brood. With Gregg Henry, Tom Bower, Mel Harris, Teri Austin, Gabrielle Carteris, Barton Heyman, and Amanda Pombo.
--- Fernando F. Croce |