A Perfect Murder (1998)

A Perfect Murder arrives from 1998, a loose remake of Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, updated so that the cuckolded husband is no longer a retired tennis champion but a Wall Street trader with margin calls eating him alive. Andrew Davis directs with the smooth, unhurried competence of a man who knows exactly which beats to hit. Michael Douglas plays Steven Taylor, a husband who regards his wife as an acquisition, which the film establishes in the first ten minutes and then demonstrates for another hundred. Gwyneth Paltrow is Emily, the wife in question, and Viggo Mortensen is the artist she prefers. The plot is a machine. It clicks.

The film carries a faint whiff of class resentment, since the villain's motive is financial ruin and his instrument is a man he can blackmail with the threat of a return to prison. This is not an argument about capital. It is a plot device wearing a suit. Detective Moe Karaman, played by David Suchet, is an Arab American officer who moves through the proceedings with more authority than the screenplay grants him, and the film never comments on his background at all, which reads as either restraint or indifference. Emily turns out to be resourceful and lethal when cornered, though the film treats this as thriller mechanics instead of a statement about anything. She survives because the third act requires it.

No sermon is delivered here. No audience is scolded, no systemic critique is mounted, no lesson is extracted from the wreckage. The film wants to be sleek and nasty, and it mostly succeeds, even if critics at the time found it competent rather than pleasurable. It lingers as a color, specifically the color of money, and nothing more. For the purposes of this classification, that restraint is itself the notable fact. A thriller from 1998 that could have preached and chose to simply kill people instead earns a measure of grudging respect.

{"thematic_tags": ["remake"]}