Sydney Film Festival Peeping Tom

Michael Powell’s psychological thriller about a young man who films the murders he commits was critically savaged upon its release in 1960. It’s now widely regarded as a masterpiece.

When the British press condemned Peeping Tom, Powell’s career was effectively ruined. In his 1986 autobiography, he wrote: ‘I make a film that nobody wants to see and then, thirty years later, everybody has either seen it or wants to see it.’

Long championed by filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, this fear-drenched tale of voyeurism and psycho-sexual desire now regularly appears on lists of the greatest British films ever made. Arriving in the same year as Norman Bates in Psycho, Powell’s portrait of sociopathic film technician Mark Lewis (a superb Karlheinz Böhm) is a riveting study in what it means to make movies – and watch them.

This film is part of the Classics Restored strand of the 71st Sydney Film Festival. There is also a screening at Dendy Newtown on Saturday 8 June 2024.

Made in England: the films of Powell and Pressburger, narrated by Scorsese, screens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Wednesday 5 June 2024.