‘Rear Window’ is a masterclass in suspense from Alfred Hitchcock, the undisputed maestro of the genre. Long before the age of CCTV and digital surveillance, Hitchcock was already probing questions of privacy and voyeurism in this tale of a wheelchair-bound magazine photographer (James Stewart) recovering from an injury. With too much time on his hands, he begins spying on his neighbours from his New York apartment and suspects that one of them has murdered his wife.

Like ‘Rope’ (also starring Stewart), this is a largely single-location film, making extraordinary use of natural sound drifting in from the courtyard. Hitchcock keeps us guessing: is Stewart merely imagining things with an overactive mind, or has he truly pieced together a sinister crime? The brilliance lies in the way his sceptical nurse (the indomitable Thelma Ritter), his glamorous fiancée (Grace Kelly), and a detective friend gradually come to share his suspicions. Soon the possibility emerges not only that Stewart is right, but that his own life may be in danger if the killer discovers who – and crucially where – he is.

Like ‘Chinatown’ two decades later, ‘Rear Window’ is essentially a point-of-view movie. We are so closely aligned with Stewart’s perspective that we begin to question whether, like him, we are missing the bigger picture. In that sense, the film becomes a sly metaphor for cinema itself: Stewart sits passively observing the dramas of others, much as we do, while drawing conclusions shaped as much by genre expectations as by reality.

Though rated PG, Hitchcock smuggles in dark and unsettling themes under the watchful eye of the censors. ‘Rear Window’ remains not only a gripping thriller but also a profound reflection on watching, interpreting, and perhaps misinterpreting the world around us.