Conceivably, schizophrenia is a malady to which all Robert Altman's major characters have been prone. Their behaviour is of little interest analysed on the level of clues or symptoms, but compelling where it gives evidence of large and dangerous attempts to comprehend an irrational world through personal experience, of minds which escape from the trap of an insane situation by going promptly, appropriately, healthily insane. Broad Laingian concepts of madness as socially conditioned, as a valid experience of a given situation, are as closely worked out in Altman's tragicomedies as in the explicit psychiatric challenge of Family Life. And perhaps just as such a theory opposes the psychiatric treatment of schizophrenia as a personal, functional disorder, so Altman has always opted for revealing his characters through complex situations rather than psychological puzzles. A precise and restless talent for experiment is evident in his switching through original combinations of comedy and drama, creating each time a complete universe, dense in detail and mood yet transparent to the passage of his characters from some rearguard delusion to eventual resignation and absorption. Self-destruction seems the inevitable conclusion, with the single exception of M∗A∗S∗H, where a best possible adjustment is made through more vigorous comedy.

Confronting an absurd situation, Altman's heroes plainly have a right to their schizoid view of the world; while their heroism exists in contrast to those skittering creatures on the periphery—the miners in McCabe, the army types in M∗A∗S∗H—more comically deluded in what they take to be a comfortable adjustment to a basically reasonable world. For Images … the population has been substantially reduced—to a vividly fragmenting personality, Cathryn …, her compulsive husband Hugh …, and the small cast of characters, both real and imaginary, who mediate their frighteningly exclusive attitudes and behaviour. Altman has insisted that his intention was not a clinical description of insanity but a reproduction of the world from Cathryn's point of view. And quite rightly—in keeping with Laing's dictum that it is possible to experience another's behaviour but not his experience—Hugh is insensitive to his wife's fantasies to a degree which reduces him to the comic grotesques of the earlier films and removes him to some remotely unfeeling corner of Cathryn's stage. (pp. 50-1)

An undeniable sense of frustration … infects the development of the film, which is eventually too direct in its communication and too abstract in its moods, insulating the spectator, as much as the other characters, from Cathryn and her predicament…. Images still requires melodrama on the order of [That Cold Day in the Park] to set the story off and keep it going—noticeably in the build-up of simple suspense during the opening scene, where Cathryn is persecuted over the telephone by a mysterious voice which she does not recognise as her own, and collapses in hysteria when the vision of a dead lover suddenly takes the place of her solicitous husband. Altman has grafted on to this his generalised conception of time and place, explicit points about Cathryn's present sexual frustration and past fears, and incorporated a materialised alter ego and other imaginary presences into a dramatic chamber piece. The result is a film which works in conventionally tight, psychological situations, rather than opening out into the landscape of the mind which the subject promises, and which McCabe and Mrs. Miller came closer to achieving. (p. 51)