Hitchcock’s Borrowed Glamour

Scarlett Johansson plays Janet Leigh in Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock—a film about the making of Psycho that ends up more interesting as a portrait of a marriage than as backstage Hollywood myth. Anthony Hopkins disappears under prosthetics to play the director in decline, obsessive and difficult, while Helen Mirren’s Alma Reville quietly holds everything together. Johansson brings the right surface to Janet Leigh: that polished, almost-too-perfect studio-system beauty that made the shower scene so transgressive in the first place. The film never quite earns its insights, but it works as a meditation on who actually does the work behind the auteur’s name.