There are filmmakers who borrow from Alfred Hitchcock, and then there is Brian De Palma.

Few directors have spent as much of their career interrogating Hitchcock’s visual language, psychological fixations and cinematic grammar. Yet Obsession—released in 1976—remains perhaps the most revealing example of De Palma’s fascination with his predecessor. It is a film constructed in the shadow of Vertigo, but rather than simply attempting to replicate Hitchcock, De Palma turns imitation itself into part of the film’s pathology.

Fifty years later, Obsession remains an intriguing and increasingly hypnotic piece of psychological cinema: an elegant, deliberately artificial film about grief, guilt, identity and the dangerous desire to recreate what has been lost.

At its centre is Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson), a wealthy New Orleans businessman whose wife Elizabeth (Geneviève Bujold) and young daughter are kidnapped. The ensuing tragedy leaves Michael devastated, and the years that follow do little to diminish his fixation on the woman he has lost.

When Michael eventually encounters Sandra Portinari, a young woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Elizabeth, grief mutates into something far more dangerous.

The premise immediately recalls Vertigo. Hitchcock’s Scottie Ferguson becomes obsessed with recreating the woman he believes he has lost; De Palma’s Michael is similarly confronted with the possibility of resurrecting his past through another woman.

But where Hitchcock’s film gradually exposes the terrifying psychological consequences of obsession, De Palma is interested in the machinery of that obsession—the rituals, repetitions and visual constructions through which cinema itself creates desire.

This is where Obsession becomes more than a simple Hitchcock pastiche.

De Palma doesn’t hide his influences. He embraces them.

The camera glides with an almost reverential precision. Mirrors fracture identities. Staircases become psychological spaces. Characters are observed through frames within frames. Faces become clues. Locations acquire an almost dreamlike quality. The film repeatedly asks us to look, then quietly questions whether what we have seen can actually be trusted.

It is unmistakably Hitchcockian.

Yet it is also unmistakably De Palma.

Where Hitchcock’s camera could often appear invisible in its precision, De Palma’s filmmaking is more conspicuous. His technique announces itself. The elaborate compositions, slow movements and visual repetitions are not simply storytelling devices; they become part of the film’s psychological architecture.

There is something almost operatic about Obsession.

That quality is reinforced by Bernard Herrmann’s score, which provides perhaps the film’s most direct connection to Hitchcock. Herrmann had famously scored Vertigo, and his music here creates an extraordinary sense of déjà vu. The score doesn’t merely accompany the film—it seems to summon another film from the past.

This is particularly appropriate because Obsession is fundamentally concerned with the inability to escape the past.

Michael doesn’t simply remember Elizabeth. He constructs his present around her absence.

His grief becomes ritual.

His memory becomes mythology.

And when Sandra enters his life, the possibility of recovering Elizabeth becomes more seductive than accepting that she is gone.

The tragedy is that Michael’s desire isn’t really for Sandra. It is for an idea.

That distinction sits at the heart of both Vertigo and Obsession. The woman becomes an image, a projection onto which the male protagonist can impose his memories and desires.

Cinema itself becomes complicit in this process.

De Palma repeatedly turns his characters into objects of visual fixation. We watch them being watched. We see people through windows, doorways and architectural frames. The act of looking becomes inseparable from the act of controlling.

And this is where De Palma’s fascination with Hitchcock becomes particularly interesting.

He isn’t merely copying Hitchcock’s techniques.

He is examining what those techniques do to an audience.

The camera seduces us just as Michael is seduced by his memories. We are encouraged to accept visual associations before we have fully understood them. We become participants in the same process of construction and reconstruction that consumes the protagonist.

The film’s New Orleans setting also contributes to this strange sense of unreality. Rather than functioning simply as a backdrop, the city feels almost like a memory itself—beautiful, historic and haunted by the past.

The locations possess a romantic grandeur, but there is something unsettling beneath that beauty.

Everything in Obsession seems to exist between two states: past and present, reality and fantasy, love and possession, memory and fabrication.

That ambiguity is central to its appeal.

It is also why the film remains fascinating despite its occasional melodramatic excesses. Obsession isn’t interested in naturalism. It wants heightened emotion, heightened architecture and heightened psychology.

It wants to feel like a nightmare dressed as a romantic thriller.

And sometimes it does.

There are moments when the film’s elaborate plotting threatens to become almost too contrived, and its Hitchcockian influences can feel less like subtle echoes and more like deliberate signposts. But that artificiality is also part of what makes the film compelling.

De Palma isn’t trying to convince us that this is ordinary life.

He’s constructing a cinematic dream.

And dreams rarely obey the rules of realism.

The most fascinating aspect of Obsession, viewed fifty years later, may therefore be the relationship between homage and originality.

At what point does influence become imitation?

And when does imitation become something new?

De Palma’s career would continue to wrestle with those questions. His fascination with Hitchcock would resurface repeatedly, sometimes playfully, sometimes provocatively and sometimes almost obsessively. But Obsession occupies a particularly important position because the Hitchcock influence isn’t simply decorative.

It is the foundation upon which the entire film has been constructed.

De Palma takes the skeleton of Vertigo and dresses it in his own visual language. He takes Hitchcock’s fascination with looking and pushes it toward voyeurism. He takes psychological obsession and makes it increasingly theatrical. He takes the idea of cinematic manipulation and makes the audience feel its effects.

In doing so, he creates something that is simultaneously derivative and deeply personal.

That contradiction is precisely what makes Obsession worth revisiting.

Fifty years on, it is tempting to view the film simply as “De Palma’s Vertigo.” But that description ultimately sells it short.

Obsession is a film about the dangers of trying to reproduce the past—and there is something wonderfully appropriate about a filmmaker making a film about reproduction while simultaneously reproducing one of cinema’s most famous psychological thrillers.

Perhaps that is the real obsession.

Not simply Michael’s desire to recreate Elizabeth.

Not simply De Palma’s fascination with Hitchcock.

But cinema’s own endless desire to revisit what came before, to take familiar images and attempt to make them live again.

Sometimes that results in imitation.

Sometimes it becomes transformation.

And in Obsession, Brian De Palma comes remarkably close to achieving both at once.

The Prognosis:

Obsession may have been born in Hitchcock’s shadow, but fifty years later, it stands as something more intriguing than a mere homage: a beautifully constructed, psychologically feverish examination of how memory, desire and cinema can become hopelessly entangled.

• Saul Muerte