If you’re trying to decide what to watch on a given streaming service, one of the best ways to make you decide to view the recent arrivals on that service and what might be leaving soon. Netflix is filled with great movies, but most of them feel like the same old things you see every time you log in.
If you’re looking for something new, though, Rear Window was just added to the streamer in June. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window is one of the best ever made. Here are three reasons you should make the time to check it out:
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It’s perfectly staged
Rear Window tells the story of a restless photographer who takes to spying on his neighbors because he’s been waylaid by a broken leg. What begins as a bit of creepy but lighthearted fun slowly gets more serious as he becomes convinced that one of his neighbors murdered his wife. As he tries to convince his girlfriend, nurse, and friend that his neighbor is guilty, we follow all the action right alongside the main character.
Rear Window is staged out the window of its title. The film even opens with a curtain being raised, almost like a performance. Everything about this elaborate backlot set is perfectly staged, so much so that you feel like you’re watching a real New York street.
It’s remarkably tense
You might think that there’s no way a movie made in 1954 could possibly hold the attention of a modern audience, but Rear Window‘s moments of suspense are better than those in almost any other movie. Although the central photographer spends most of the film simply watching the action from a distance, that only works to make things more suspenseful.
As we become more convinced that something sinister’s at work, the movie’s central character and the audience become the same: people watching the action unfold who find themselves unable to intervene to prevent something terrible from happening. It’s a brilliant, wholly original formal conceit.
It features the luminous Grace Kelly
Although the surface-level plot of Rear Window is about a man who suspects his neighbor of murder, the movie is at least as much about one man’s obsession with watching the world and his disinterest in actually living in it. That’s embodied by his girlfriend, played by the incredible Grace Kelly.
Kelly plays Lisa, a woman of high fashion who’s desperate for her boyfriend to pay her even a little bit of attention. Given that she looks and behaves like Grace Kelly, the fact that he doesn’t is frankly outrageous. Once she gets involved in the action he cares about, he starts to change his tune in ways both fascinating and enthralling.
You can watch Rear Window on Netflix.
