Psycho

Description:
Phoenix , Friday, December 11, 2:43pm. Marion Crane, a beautiful and young secretary of a real estate agency, is in love with Sam Loomis, an entrepreneur and owner of a hardware store, with whom she has been in a secret relationship for some time, made up of fleeting meetings in the hotel during her break lunch. One day the owner closes a $40,000 deal on a new house. Instead of paying with checks, the buyer brings 400 $100 bills with him. The owner hands them over to Marion, whom she trusts, entrusting her with the task of paying them to the bank as soon as possible. Marion comes out with the money, but she leaves for a completely different destination.

After a long car ride, not knowing what to do, he decides to sleep in the car. She is woken up by a policeman, who asks her a few questions to understand her state of mind. Marion sets off again, but she notices that the policeman is following her. At the nearest town she stops at a dealership and swaps her car to leave no traces. She gets back in the car. After a few hours, surprised by a sudden and pouring rain, she accidentally exits the highway and sees the sign of a motel (the "Bates Motel"), surmounted by a huge house located on a hill nearby. As she watches one of the house's windows with the light on, Marion notices the shadow of a woman moving across a room. Marion honks her horn and is joined by the young owner and manager of the motel, Norman Bates, who tells her that he has the motel vacant for some time since, after the change of route of the motorway, it is located on a secondary road (here Marion realizes she has taken the wrong exit). The boy is immediately kind and, after giving Marion her room number 1, invites her to dinner at her house with him and her mother.

Norman returns to the house to prepare dinner but has a heated argument with his elderly mother, a discussion that Marion listens to from outside without witnessing it in person. The mother, with whom Norman lives, is an invalid woman who proves narrow-minded, selfish and refuses to accept Marion in her house. Norman, embittered, goes down to the motel with the dishes and offers his guest to have dinner in the office lounge. Here the young man, striking up a seemingly banal and obvious conversation with the woman, reveals himself emotionally fragile and very attached to her mother who, although invalid, shrewish and possessive, never appears. Marion, comparing her life with Norman's, realizes that she, however flat and without satisfaction, her individuality as a frustrated woman is not as intolerable as it previously appeared to her: she then decides to return to Phoenix to return the stolen money, before it's too late. She then takes leave of Norman and prepares to take a shower. Suddenly a female figure appears in the bathroom, assaults the unsuspecting Marion, brutally stabs her to death and sneaks away from her. Soon Norman arrives who, after an initial moment of horror, decides to clean the blood from the crime scene, then loads the body and suitcase into Marion's car, finally adding the newspaper in which the woman had hidden the money and lets it sink the medium in the pond of the nearby pond. He then takes his leave of Norman and gets ready to take a shower. Suddenly a female figure appears in the bathroom, assaults the unsuspecting Marion, brutally stabs her to death and sneaks away. Soon Norman arrives who, after an initial moment of horror, decides to clean the blood from the crime scene, then loads the body and suitcase into Marion's car, finally adding the newspaper in which the woman had hidden the money and lets it sink the medium in the pond of the nearby pond. He then takes his leave of Norman and gets ready to take a shower. Suddenly a female figure appears in the bathroom, assaults the unsuspecting Marion, brutally stabs her to death and sneaks away. Soon Norman arrives who, after an initial moment of horror, decides to clean the blood from the crime scene, then loads the body and suitcase into Marion's car, finally adding the newspaper in which the woman had hidden the money and lets it sink the medium in the pond of the nearby pond.

A week later Lila Crane, Marion's sister, goes to the shop of Sam Loomis, her lover, to find out where her sister is. Sam has no news of the girl, but just then enters Milton Arbogast, a private investigator hired by Marion's boss to find her stolen money. Arbogast agrees with Lila and Sam and searches all the motels in the area for traces of the missing girl.

Arriving at the Bates Motel, Arbogast interrogates Norman and, from his uncertainties, understands that he is hiding something. He says goodbye to him, leaves and reaches a telephone booth: he informs Lila and Sam that he has discovered that Marion has slept there and announces that within the hour he will be in town. Instead he decides to return to the motel to investigate further: entering Bates' house, while climbing the stairs to question Norman's mother, he is attacked and killed by Marion's own assassin. After three hours of useless waiting, Lila and Sam decide to go to the sheriff of the nearby town, the one where Marion was headed before disappearing, to in turn ask for useful information about her where she might be. The sheriff's wife suggests calling Norman at his motel to ask if the detective has come to see him. Norman confirms the circumstance, then declaring that he saw Arbogast leave. After the phone call, the sheriff, surprised by the fact that Arbogast had claimed that Norman lived with her mother, reveals to Sam and Lila that this is not possible because the woman committed suicide ten years earlier by ingestingstrychnine after killing his partner.

Not convinced of the veracity of Norman's words, Lila believes that Arbogast has discovered important clues, otherwise he would not have disappeared into thin air without informing her and Sam, and becomes convinced that someone has prevented him from doing so. The two realize that the only thing to do is go in person. Thus they arrive at the Bates Motel posing as a newlywed couple. While Sam entertains Norman, Lila enters her home, finding it empty. Norman performs the trick and knocks Sam out, then runs towards the house. Lila sees him and hides in the cellar. Here she makes a gruesome discovery: she finds the mummified corpse of a woman, the real Mrs. Bates. Lila lets out a loud cry. At the same instant a woman enters the cellar with a long knife in her hand. The female figure who committed the murders reveals her identity: it is Norman, dressed in his mother's clothes. As Norman removes his killing arm, Sam enters and blocks him before he can kill Lila.

Shortly after the arrest, Norman is subjected to a psychiatric examination. The psychiatrist Fred Richmond, following a long conversation with the young man, reveals the mystery to Lila, Sam and the investigators: ten years earlier Norman had killed his mother and her partner because, after his father's death, he had developed a strong, pathological Oedipus complexagainst the woman who, by getting engaged to another man, had (according to Norman) betrayed her son, and so Norman had poisoned her and her partner. Subsequently, the remorse for her gesture had split the young man's personality in two, giving a part of it (and in a certain sense bringing it back to life) to his mother, who he revived by dressing like her and even managing to imitate her voice perfectly . However, the jealousy that Norman felt for his mother was not sufficient to make her fully alive, therefore he had also staged the opposite, that is, he made "his mother" jealous of him, implementing that psychopathological mechanism of repression of the experience which is known in psychoanalysis as "projective identification". Consequently, whenever Norman had to deal with women who were not his mother, this

In addition to that of Marion, Norman's "mother" also confesses to the murders of two other young women who disappeared previously, crimes that have remained unsolved. With the capture, however, Norman's personality was totally subjugated by that of his mother, so much so that when the policeman on duty hands him a blanket, Norman replies with his mother's voice and even denies himself that he was actually able to perform its actions. The film closes with the scene of the re-emergence of Marion's car, fished out of the swamp.