Shock 2001 Horror Movie Review

Shock is an enjoyable film noir that belongs in a subgenre—let’s call it the psychoanalytic murder melodrama—which flourished after the success of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Here, the set-up is delicious:  nervous wife Anabel Shaw, already anxious about her soldier husband’s delayed return home, witnesses a murder in a neighboring hotel room. Going into a deep state of—you guessed it—shock, she needs the care of San Francisco’s leading psychiatrist, who just happens to be staying at the same hotel. Unfortunately, said analyst is none other than the murderer himself (Vincent Price), and he quickly realizes that if the lady comes out of her catatonic state, he’ll be exposed for killing his wife. Things slow down once the action shifts to Price’s private sanitarium, but Lynn Bari is fun to watch as his va-va-voom assistant/mistress/femme fatale, and Price himself indicates his young aptitude for the kind of sinister, tortured roles that would make him a mainstay of Edgar Allan Poe stories. There’s also fun in listening to the psychoanalytic jargon spouted along the way, a distinctly Hollywood version of Freud. All in all, this unheralded 1946 picture counts at least as a minor rediscovery in the noir canon. —Robert Horton