Abandoning the Gothic mists of Rebecca's Cornwall, but retaining his protagonist (and future Oscar winner) Joan Fontaine, Alfred Hitchcock here orchestrates a cruel chamber opera, a Kammerspiel disguised as a romantic thriller, where the true prison is not an isolated mansion, but the bond of marriage itself. The Master of Suspense takes the trope of the "damsel in distress" and internalizes it, transforming the external threat into a psychological thorn. The question the film poses is not "Who is the killer?", but "Is the man I love, the man I sleep with, a killer?" It is an architecture of paranoia built entirely on female subjectivity, and therefore, a chillingly modern work.

The absolute stroke of genius, the fulcrum around which the entire edifice of doubt hinges, is the casting. Casting Cary Grant as Johnnie Aysgarth is one of the most subversive moves in Hollywood history. Grant, in 1941, wasn't an actor: he was an institution. He was the epitome of screwball grace, the ideal lover, the self-assured hero, the ultimate exponent of mid-Atlantic charm. Hitchcock takes this icon of reliability and perverts it. Every dazzling smile of Johnnie's, every offhand quip, every elegant gesture, is reinterpreted through the paranoid lens of his wife, Lina McLaidlaw (Fontaine), as the mask of a sociopath. Her charm isn't a tool of seduction, it's a weapon of distraction. Hitchcock deconstructs Grant's star persona, forcing the audience to question what they love most. Johnnie is a pathological liar, a compulsive gambler, a brazen thief who doesn't hesitate to embezzle trust funds. The film forces us to ask: what is the moral distance between a con man and a wife killer? For Lina, and for us, that distance narrows with every scene, with every shadow cast on the wall.

And Hitchcock is the supreme master of those shadows. The mise-en-scène of The Hunt is pure German Expressionism transplanted to the English Home Counties. Harry Stradling Sr.'s cinematography transforms a luxurious bourgeois villa into a Gothic castle. The house, which should be the symbol of domestic security, becomes a trap. The staircase (Hitchcock's architectural fetish par excellence, from Psycho to Vertigo) is not simply a connection between floors, but a potential gallows, a place of transition between safety and threat. Johnnie's shadow climbing the stairs, cast to resemble a menacing spider, is pure cinema: it doesn't show danger, it shows the idea of ​​danger. And then, there's that glass of milk. It's perhaps the most famous emotional MacGuffin of the director's career. In a legendary technical feat (placing a light bulb inside the glass to make it glow in the dark), Hitchcock doesn't show us a glass of milk. He shows us a chalice of radioactive poison, a grail of domestic death. It's the perfect objectification, luminous and terrifying, of Lina's fear. Hitchcock doesn't film reality; he films thought.

The film is a brutal reflection on gaslighting, years before the term entered the common lexicon (Cukor's eponymous film dates back to 1944). It's a treatise on the condition of women in a patriarchal world that dismisses female intuition as "hysteria." Lina is trapped. She's the classic "spinster" (according to the cruel taxonomy of the time) who has spent her life reading novels and fearing loneliness. Johnnie is her only, exciting escape. But escape turns out to be a more sophisticated prison. When she begins to suspect, her anxiety is constantly invalidated, mocked, treated like an illness. Everyone around her, including her parents, is complicit in Johnnie's charm. Fontaine's performance is a masterpiece of implosion: we see her terror building behind her eyes, her posture stiffening, her voice breaking. She's a woman trying to figure out if she's losing her husband or losing her mind. The film draws us so deeply into her subjectivity that we begin to doubt ourselves.

And here we come to the Gordian knot, the elephant in the room, the ending that has infuriated (and still infuriates) generations of film buffs. In the original novel, Before the Fact by Francis Iles, Johnnie is a murderer. He poisons Lina. The end. But this is 1941. This is RKO, not an independent production. And above all, this is Cary Grant. The Hays Code and the studio stubbornly insisted: a star of Grant's caliber can't be a wife killer, and the (alleged) heroine can't die of her own naiveté. Hitchcock was forced into a narrative about-face. The ending, such as it is, is a logical scramble, in which Johnnie hastily explains every single clue (the poison was for himself, not for her!). It's clumsy, it's artificial, it's a betrayal. Or is it? And it's here that the work, perhaps unintentionally, reaches a meta-theoretical depth.