This film screened in April 2010.

Although many critics, including Robin Wood, considered Hitchcock’s final film to be a minor if pleasant entertainment, Jonathan Rosenbaum thought it one of the director’s finest. ‘Unlike Hitchcock’s other late films (Torn Curtain, Topaz and Frenzy), which tend to break up into set pieces, this is all of a piece – a superbly integrated and intricate, as well as charming, piece of mischief built around two romantic couples (Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris, Karen Black and William Devane) and a ‘double’ plot. When the French critics of the New Wave insisted on taking Hitchcock seriously long before anyone else did, one of their key pieces of evidence was Hitchcock’s very intricate use of stories involving double plots and rhyming shots, such as Shadow of a Doubt and The Wrong Man. Family Plot places this very concept front and centre, and Hitchcock plays with it brilliantly, like
a perfectly composed piece of music.’