This is obviously Carpenter doing a riff on Hitchcock’s Rear Window. This is Carpenter’s voyeurism film.
Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) has just arrived in LA to start a job as a live TV director. Using a generous bonus from her previous job she takes a luxury apartment in the swanky Arkham Towers (and yes I’m sure the Lovecraft reference is deliberate). This is an enormous high rise apartment building and it’s very high-tech. It has elaborate security.
But as Leigh finds out she is not safe there at all.
She gets creepy nuisance phone calls. Not threatening or obscene, but subtly creepy. She gets mysterious notes delivered to her. She receives expensive gifts, supposedly from a travel company. She starts to suspect that this guy knows all about her. He knows everything that she does.
The scary part is that he makes no direct threats. She has no idea what he actually wants. He might be a relatively harmless weirdo. He might be very dangerous. There’s no way of knowing.
It takes her a while but eventually she figures out that the guy is watching her from another apartment building. But it’s a high-rise building as well. This guy could be in any one of hundreds of apartments.
The police can’t help because she doesn’t know who the guy is and he has not yet broken any actual laws.
Her new boyfriend Paul (David Birney) is sympathetic but he’s a philosophy professor not an action hero.
Her best friend Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) is very supportive but it’s difficult for any of them to do anything really useful.
Of course everybody who has ever discussed the subject of movies about voyeurism has made the very obvious point that all movies are voyeuristic - we are watching other people’s lives. And of course a film director is not just watching the lives of the characters but also manipulating them. An interesting twist that Carpenter adds here is that Leigh is a television director, so she herself is a kind of voyeur and a kind of manipulator.
Technically this movie is impressive. Carpenter does a more than competent job as director. He understands pacing and he understands the basic techniques of suspense. The suspense scenes work. The basic setup is very promising.
There are however major flaws. There is not a single interesting characters in the movie, and not one of the characters really comes to life. By the end of the movie we do not know a single thing about Leigh. She’s a complete blank. Her apartment looks like a hotel room. It does not look like someone actually lives there. There are no personal touches.
Her friend Sophie is pleasant but she really just functions as a plot device.
Leigh’s boyfriend Paul is a harmless nonentity. We learn nothing about him. There is no erotic or romantic heat between Leigh and Paul. Even after they begin an affair they behave more like casual acquaintances.
This is an extraordinarily lifeless sexless movie. Maybe Carpenter wanted to avoid making an exploitation movie but the problem is that as a result the stalker’s motivation remains inexplicable. There is not the slightest indication that he has even the mildest sexual interest in her. So what is his motivation? OK, he wants to control her, but why? His notes to her are polite but impersonal. Maybe he hates women, but we get no indications that this is so. Maybe he has a romantic obsession with her, but we also get no indications that this might be the case. Maybe he feels powerless? Maybe, but we’re offered no evidence.
The idea that the stalker wants to stalk Leigh from a safe distance and is afraid to get close to her is a good one. Unfortunately it isn’t developed.
The vagueness of his motivation somehow makes the threat less scary.
It’s difficult to judge the acting since the characters are so underwritten.
I’m a huge admirer of Carpenter’s work but I’m inclined to think that realistic thrillers about real people were definitely not his forte. It’s easy to see why he moved rapidly away from this type of movie.
Someone’s Watching Me is well-crafted and reasonably entertaining but there’s something missing. Carpenter completists will want to seek it out and it is interesting as a movie made before Carpenter really found his voice, but it is very much lesser Carpenter.
The Scream Factory Blu-Ray offers both 1.33:1 and widescreen aspect ratios. Both look terrific. 1.33:1 is how it was originally broadcast.
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