The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 299

A suspense drama as well as a complex psychological study, Vertigo tells the story of a former police detective, Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), who is hired to shadow the suicidal Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) as she sleepwalks through San Francisco. The enigmatic blond soon becomes the object of Ferguson's repressed desire, and he becomes so obsessed with curing her that he endangers his rational belief system. As he compulsively tries to help (and control) Elster, his own fear of heights makes him, ultimately, unable to prevent her suicide. Later, he meets another woman, who looks just like Elster, and tries to regain control by remaking her into a fetishized image of the dead woman. Eventually, however, the detective is revealed to have been a pawn in somebody else's deceptive scheme all along.

Employing surreal imagery and using fog filters to create dreamlike colors—all supported by Bernard Herrmann's haunting score—Hitchcock brilliantly explores his protagonist's spiraling psychological disintegration and pathological obsession with the perfect image of an unattainable woman. The filmmaker's masterful manipulation of the audience parallels the story line, particularly the detective's compulsion to manipulate the fate of the woman. Hitchcock visualizes Ferguson's acrophobia by repeating a vertiginous zoom-forward/track-backward shot. In addition, many familiar themes that recur in other Hitchcock films—fetishism, scopophilia, necrophilia, and the Doppelgänger motif—are present in this chilling, probing film.