Largely overlooked for the films that flank it in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, 1956’s The Wrong Man is a deviously minimalist minor masterpiece, a slowly encroaching fog of existential despair in between more obviously conspicuous crests of cinematic ability. If his other, more obviously masterful films from the same era constitute apexes of formal control and metacritical acumen, The Wrong Man is striking for how thoroughly unadorned it is, how barrenly it lays itself before us. 1954’s Rear Window dissected voyeuristic masculinity. 1958’s Vertigo analyzed the desire to find patterns in a world of chaos, to bind an unwound world with illusions of control and continuity, even to shape others to fit your prefabricated mold of them. 1960’s Psycho recognized that we are all our own protagonist in our story, and that recognizing this fact might suddenly dismember someone else’s story. The Wrong Man shares imaginative territory with all these films, but it also totally evacuates them. It is not a vortex, magnetically collecting particles of cinematic skill into a violently-wound whole, but a nebula, a dispersed array of images and sounds that collectively expel our expectations for a sophisticated potboiler or a sudden shock. Unusually for this master cinematic magician, it seems to have nothing up its sleeve. It only has itself, and it lays itself bare for us.

The Wrong Man, which nominally traverses Hitch’s most thrilling, most recurrent territory of misidentified protagonists, is not a masterful thriller but a self-consciously master-less one, a film that is absolutely and finally prey to the vagaries of the world around it. Here, and only here, did Hitch suggest that the modern world itself is so chaotically unmoored and so distorted with the vagaries of chance and suspicion, that his capacity to carefully fabricate and painstakingly demarcate complex stories of control and blame can’t match up. Hitchcock’s ability to craft ingenious episodes of spellbinding confusion have nothing, he suggests, on life’s everyday ability to make us enemies of ourselves.

In this sense, The Wrong Man’s closest analogue might be 1963’s The Birds, whichsummons a truly unsettling inquest of unthinking, unthinkable terror and provides no explanation at all for it. Even the pat-Freudian ones about psychosexual repression applied to the script at the time, although not wrong in their way, finally prove inadequate to the gaping maw of sheer uncertainty that film opens before us. The Wrong Man is even more seemingly inert, so disturbingly devoid of the diabolical maestro’s teeming eye for visual and narrative intricacy that it becomes, in its disquieting ineffability, truly, mesmerizingly bleak. The archetypal title of The Wrong Man, which sounds like Hitchcock crystallized into a myth, in fact generalizes his corpus, suggesting that this is both the ur-Hitchocock film and the one that needs no adornment.

The title is not wrong. Ostensibly, The Wrong Man is a breath release, a self-conscious exercise in cinematic naturalism, one that seems to demand little more of Hitch than to observe a world he was usually too busy puppeteering to his delight. Perhaps recognizing the waning days of Old Hollywood and the influence of neorealism, The Wrong Man plays like an accidental accomplice of the concurrent trend of quasi-documentary New York features, film’s like The Naked City which, with its similarly brute title, promise a direct shot of everyday existence. Yet in combining Hitchcock’s perspectival flexibility and famously dictatorial command of the cinematic space with a nominally more passive view of daily life in the 1950s, The Wrong Man feels like an impossible experiment and becomes a strangely troubling one.

Hitch was a somewhat Janus-faced, contradictory filmmaker, a domineering, pre-planned, immovable sculptor who was, in his narrative metaphysics, obsessed with chance and instability. His aloof, uncommitted protagonists suffer the terrifying instability of a world some unseen director is presiding over. But The Wrong Man almost singularly deflates the director’s aspirations of order. It depicts not a contrived conspiracy, but an accident of circumstance. When Christopher Emmanuel “Manny” Balestrero (Henry Fonda) walks into a bank, the heel of the law is brought down upon him by a tiny accumulation of details and sheer inexplicability, mistaken for a past robber and finding increasingly opaque ways to further incriminate himself as the heat it turned up. Along the way, his wife Rose (Vera Miles) starts to blame herself for reasons that remain as opaque to us as they are obvious. The film has no excuses for any of its looseness – it explains nothing, knowing that its pile-up of unlikely coincidence demands a reason –  other than the sheer fact of the world’s own mercurial menace. It implies that, if it were not this accumulation ofmistakes the camera happened to observe, we’d find another one right across the street.

In the act of anatomizing this mistrial of justice, The Wrong Man achieves iconographic generalizability. We are all Wrong Men, the film proposes. We just don’t know when the vicissitudes of variability will align against us. When Hitch, for the one and only time in this film, shows his formal hand in a sudden, explosively cracked mirror, it feels like a film desperately trying to stave off the dimmer terror creeping at the margins of its mind, destroying itself to avoid a much more unsettling, far more insidious terror, one that has no analogue in the usual toolkits of directorial paranoia. When Manny is on trial, and Fonda looks around the courtroom eyeing everyone with sheer open-faced vulnerability, he does so not, as in any other film, out of fear or a rattled sense that some specific person there is out to get him. Rather, he acts out of a kind of strange, self-evacuating curiosity as he reckons with the limits of the world around him, finding blissfully unaware people who, spontaneously and unthinkingly, could become an instrument of someone else’s doom through sheer bad luck.

When it was released, a young Jean-Luc Godard got all this exactly right when he wrote “the only suspense in The Wrong Man is that of chance itself. The subject of this film lies less in the unexpectedness of events than in their probability. With each shot, each transition, each composition, Hitchcock does the only thing possible for the rather paradoxical but compelling reason that he could do anything he liked.” The point seems to be that there’s no real way to frame this kind of cosmic tremor within the confines of the cloistered, funneled narrative structure Hitchcock usually confines himself to, but that this film retroactively rewrites all of Hitch’s films as a collective vision of an inescapably precarious universe. If not for this murderer or that conspiracy, something much deadlier and far more mundane would set itself upon us. None of the people in the film particularly cares about the events of our story, but with bracingly neorealist texture, Hitch implies that bare reality could conspire to weaponize any of them to do its bidding without them even knowing. Seemingly without even lifting a directorial finger, Hitch has crumbled the entire conceptual universe that launders his will to power and his ability to control us. The Wrong Man is a truly existentialist conundrum, a slowly encroaching doom that needs no narrative manipulation and no stylistic showboating to shatter the soul of the narrative form that Hitchcock spent decades mastering. The culprit, finally, is found, and the wrong man is absolved, but the illusion of the “right” man has been lost forever.

Score: 10/10