“Kim Novak‘s Vertigo” has one of the more heartwarming and, frankly, historically significant, codas to a film-focused documentary in recent memory. It’s such a special moment that it mostly justifies the way the film has been assembled before it.
Until then, it’s quite an uneven and unstructured cinematic portrait, and one of the weaker efforts from its director Alexandre O. Philippe. The Swiss-born cinephile has become a kind of cross between Laurent Bouzereau and Mark Cousins with his succession of documentaries about iconic films and film subjects.
Novak is certainly a worthy subject for a documentary. She’s not only the last survivor of the film that many consider the greatest ever made, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” but she is the nexus of obsession in a film about obsession that has inspired so much obsession in the 67 years since its release itself. At 92, her star power is as grand and magnificent as ever. But more than commanding your gaze as any great star does, and as Hitchcock certainly did in that ultimate film about “the gaze,” Novak also holds your attention as a uniquely thoughtful artist in her own right.
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Philippe takes us on a journey through her career. Born Marilyn Novak and assigned the name Kim by the tyrannical Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn, Novak existed in a constant state of tension in Hollywood. She bristled against what she calls the “overdone” acting of ’50s movie stars and prized naturalistic “reacting” instead. And she wanted meatier, more substantive roles that the industry simply would not give her at the time: Having worked as a model, Novak, to the powers that be, embodied glamour above all else, and the moguls had no use for other types of meaning she could create and represent. They wanted to focus on her surface appeal, on her mystique. That she was a source of desire rather than a subjective force in her own right.
If anything, Novak herself added depth and dimension that the suits didn’t want or ask for in their desire to make her the industry’s number-one box office star — which, in the late ’50s, she indeed became. The number of great films to her name, then, is arguably limited: Joshua Logan’s “Picnic,” Otto Preminger’s “The Man with the Golden Arm,” Richard Quine’s “Bell, Book, and Candle,” and of course, “Vertigo.”
“Kim Novak’s Vertigo” shows some of the misogynistic indignities she had to endure onscreen, with clips from “Pal Joey” and “Kiss Me, Stupid” that probably added to Novak’s ultimate desire to leave Hollywood altogether, which she had mostly done by the late ’60s. The documentary is most interesting when it doesn’t linger on clips from her movies, but when it focuses on her in the present at her home in Oregon. An avid painter for decades, Novak is seen at her easel putting brush to canvas and creating paintings of extraordinary swirling, whirlpool-like complexity. One definitely thinks of the spiral motif in “Vertigo.” And in several works, she’s outright created her own version of “Vertigo” fan art, recreating images of her Madeleine and Judy from the film.
“Vertigo” has clearly haunted her the way that it has generations of film lovers. Aside from its reputation and its inherent artistic greatness on many levels, it’s the one time in any movie that Novak was able to interrogate the very thing that frustrated her so much about her Hollywood career: That the industry was unable to see beyond the surface of her. And so she talks at length about how the characters of Madeleine and Judy speak to her deeply and remain with her and part of her. She talks about “Vertigo” as if both an insider and outsider — yes, she’s in the movie and the very heart of it, but, perhaps because of Hitchcock’s way of moving actors around like chess pieces, as objects for him to control, the way she talks about it is still somewhat removed, like that was another person onscreen and her at the same time.
That means that, when she speaks about “Vertigo,” it’s not that different from what any diehard obsessive of it would have to say, even as her experience is fundamentally singular. It lays bare the gulf between what’s onscreen and what’s real life, quite potently. Between the surface and what lies beneath. Between Kim Novak the movie star and Kim Novak the person.
She’s articulate and searching throughout, the movie even opening with narration that you might think had come from Jonas Mekas more than from Novak — because of course at the height of her fame she wasn’t allowed to be expressive like this. “I hesitate to even be recording this because I don’t know what’s gonna come out of what I say, what I mean,” she began. “What do I mean? Is that what it’s about: What do I mean? What do I think? What do I feel? I don’t know what’s expected of me to feel, or to think, or even to be, for that matter.”
In every sense, what’s most interesting about “Kim Novak’s Vertigo” comes from Novak herself. Philippe’s filmmaking seems especially rudimentary here, far more than in his William Shatner portrait “You Can Call Me Bill.” It’s powerful and compelling that Novak can occupy the role of fan of “Vertigo” the way she does — less interesting is Philippe’s own fan gushing. He has abandoned the close textual analysis of his other Hitchcock study, “78/52,” which precisely dissected how the “Psycho” shower scene achieves its effect, in favor of choosing not to give much perspective here at all. He just wants to revel in the feeling of “Vertigo,” the feeling of knowing Kim Novak, this time around — not examine what’s at the root of those feelings.
As a film then, “Kim Novak’s Vertigo” is disappointing. It feels like a beautiful portrait without a frame. A worthy companion to her receiving the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, but not much of a cinematic achievement in its own right.
And yet, just as “Kim Novak’s Vertigo” appears to occupy that space of 2024’s “Merchant/Ivory” documentary — another doc made by a fan without much to say other than gush — it features a coda of jolting consequence. Novak goes through her belongings, collected over decades and in boxes for all that time, and comes upon what may be the most iconic suit-dress in movie history. The grey suit that Madeleine had worn and that Judy wears at the end of “Vertigo” in the moment that she’s revealed to have been Madeleine all along. It’s been sitting in a box in Novak’s possession for 67 years.
She pulls it out, and it’s still soft and totally unfaded as if it were 1958 all over again. She sniffs it, to make it that much more a part of herself. And cries in gratitude over seeing it again and being with it again. Suddenly, film history is so very alive in that moment. Immediate and eternal all at once. Just like “Vertigo.”
Grade: B-
“Kim Novak’s Vertigo” premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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