mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Is this an example of your bedside manner, doctor?"
"No, ma'am. That comes later."
Dr Bennell you dog!
Yes, we're in the USA in the 1950's and so everything is as perfect as could be. Lawns are green and smooth. Cars are shiny and chrome. Kids play in carbon copied urban sunlight tranquillity. Gorgeous unattached women go about their day dressed and made up as if for a formal night out. Everyone defers to the Doc, the most trusted man in a community free of suspicion or fear.
Don Siegel crafts such a comforting glow around this small town Californian community that the onset of the nightmare feels genuinely like some kind of simple misunderstanding. And as it intensifies, the atmosphere of unreality persists. In fact, the calmer everyone becomes, the worse things are getting - because if you're calm and accepting, you've already been snatched.
The choice of phrasing has always seemed a little uncanny to me. Where is everyone being "snatched" to? There seems no explicable way for the physical transformation to take place. OK, yes, these pods appear and grow replacement bodies - that much makes sense. But the film is deliberately obscure on the mechanics. Although we are shown plenty of doppelgangers transporting pods hither and thither in trucks, we already know that these things seem to just magically appear nearby to wherever you have had the inevitable misfortune to fall asleep.
And although the pupating forms clearly suggest a physical duality, the conversion itself seems to happen in an instant - that moment when you look away - and the physical duality is forgotten. The original becomes the replacement. If there's a more unnerving analogy for human psychology's alarming predilection for adopting diametrically opposed ideologies at the slightest prompting, pop culture has yet to see it. Why think up another one when we can just reimagine this sci-fi-horror ur-text again and again and again?
"The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it will ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe. Everything except itself."
