By Peter Keough

To his credit, Mark Cousins does provide some insights into Alfred Hitchcock’s motifs and obsessions, from doors to staircases to creepy, dank interiors crammed with gizmos, gewgaws, and cobwebs.

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock (2022). Directed by Mark Cousins. At the Kendall Square Cinema.

Director Alfred Hitchcock: he doesn’t have much good to say about the current century with its trivial and distracting tech wonders.

Though I believe it impossible to ever tire of clips from movies by the title auteur, the voice-over narrative in Mark Cousins’s My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock (2022) puts my faith to the test. Compounding my irritation is the film’s conceit that these are the actual words of Hitchcock himself, uttered 40 years after his death, perhaps from some posthumous hell where great artists are punished for their hubris.

As you might expect, Hitchcock doesn’t have much good to say about the current century with its trivial and distracting tech wonders and which is represented here by generic Gen Z stand-ins. “What things they are, your cell phones,” he snorts. “With your secrets and discretions on them. They are little, ticking bombs, don’t you think?” And indeed, one wonders what Hitchcock might have made of them had he lived long enough.

Not until its end does the film unnecessarily admit that it is not really Hitchcock speaking, but British comedian and impressionist Alistair McGowan, who exaggerates the director’s plummy, insouciant haughtiness familiar from the TV show and who sounds like he has a bad cold. Nor are these Hitchcock’s words, but a concoction by Cousins derived from his immersion in the films and books written about the subject by Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia, by Tippi Hedren, and by others. But then, as the faux Hitchcock confides, “You do know that films are lies, don’t you?” Which is about as deep and insightful as his commentary gets.

Divided into six sections, the film explores themes in the director’s oeuvre ranging from “1. Escape” — about how we all want an escape and that’s what movies are for — to “6. Height”– about how high angle shots reveal the director’s godlike omniscience (Cousins might also have noted that Hitchcock himself was only 5’ 7”). Though discursive, these segments manage to eke out a few interesting observations and tidbits. Like in an aside in the section titled “Loneliness” where “Hitchcock” relates how in a moment of solitude he took a stroll and dropped the inscribed lighter from Strangers on a Train (1951) into a sewer grate, imitating a scene in that movie. (Or did he? Remember, films are lies!)

Still, to his credit, Cousins does provide some insights into Hitchcock’s motifs and obsessions, from doors to staircases to creepy, dank interiors crammed with gizmos, gewgaws, and cobwebs. Undercutting the stereotype of the director as a kind of misogynistic fetishist, the film shares some the master’s most breathtaking images of women’s faces, from the shadow-casting radiance of Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954) to the simmering pathos and rage of Sylvia Sidney in Sabotage (1936).

And it offers a sizable helping of some of the neglected earlier and later films, from his first extant credited feature The Pleasure Garden (1925) to his last Family Plot (1976). Though the usual suspects such as Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959), and Vertigo (1958) get plenty of airtime, so also do Torn Curtain (1966), Jamaica Inn (1939), Young and Innocent (1937), and The Farmer’s Wife (1928). Perhaps the most poignant moment here is a scene from that latter film, in which a widower gazes at the empty chair, illuminated with flickering firelight, where his late spouse once sat, demonstrating that one of Hitchcock’s and cinema’s greatest virtues is the expressive power of absence and silence.

Would that virtue have been more in evidence here. Instead, there is the repeated frustration of being drawn into one of the films only to be dragged out by the pseudo Hitchcock, who butts in with some inane commentary, like an audience member who is all too eager to share an unilluminating observation. Cousins tackled another towering filmmaker before — with greater success and without using this device — in his The Eyes of Orson Welles (2017). Like that earlier effort, this documentary has the merit of calling attention to a giant of the cinema in an age when such genius might be dismissed. As a reminder of what movies are capable of My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock is worth a look, but one would do better to go directly to the source and read Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), or better yet, just watch the films.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).