Quartile rating: 5/10 · 1 rating
A young female embezzler arrives at the Bates Motel, which has terrible secrets of its own.
Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece is one of cinema's most notorious creative misfires. By slavishly recreating the original's composition and structure in color, it offers almost zero narrative or conceptual novelty — it is definitionally derivative. The acting is uneven, with Vince Vaughn miscast as Norman Bates and Anne Heche lacking the magnetic presence of Janet Leigh. Cinematography earns a modest bump for the color palette and technical fidelity to the source, but even that feels hollow as homage rather than genuine vision. The ending, lifted wholesale, loses its power without the psychological weight the original built. The film raises interesting questions about cinematic reproduction and authorship, but fails to answer them meaningfully.