"Spellbound" is a soupy, synthetic movie that will probably hold your attention. For one thing it deals, as few movies have, with the analysis of a man … who is said to be suffering from paranoia, schizophrenia and a guilt complex. What is more, it reveals the basic situation in psychoanalysis wherein the patient lies on a couch and says whatever comes into his mind, regardless of the consequences. It is also fairly accurate about some of the questions an analyst asks, some of the things a patient says, and both their reactions. The attitude is always youthful and wide-eyed and the movie as slow-motion and unbelievable as a story in the Woman's Home Companion. The plot … is worked out with excessive care to give each step some degree of logic, but it is a logic you never believe in and you don't feel that its director … does either. Hitchcock's methods of creating tension, fear and obsessive fascination in a character for some threatening or alluring object, have become very mechanical, but he still produces those elements better than most directors. Also he still makes a tight, streamlined mystery….

The mixture of analysis and murder doesn't come to much, especially for analysis…. There is an almost imperceptible amount of characterization of the hero—he has the quality of being less a person than a limp object. One reason for this is that only one brief instant of his past and little of his present are shown. When he comes into the picture he appears completely misplaced and he always seems to be suffering from the fact of being there…. Throughout, Hitchcock and his script-writer, Ben Hecht, imply that the hero is both completely capable and completely incapable of murder. Confusion doesn't seem to be their aim so much as the fact that every time they imply the worst in their hero they are able to build a melodramatic situation.

It is my belief that the analysis, which takes about three hours and is performed literally on the run from the police, on a Pullman, in a New York hotel room and during a ski jump, was just getting started as the picture ended.

By this time the talent and intelligence that Hitchcock showed in his English movies have been diluted to the point where he no longer seems very talented or intelligent…. The average Hitchcock shot today is usually without an effective, provocative or original detail; the photography is an all-soft, warm, harmonious kind in which backgrounds are blurred out; his real efforts at expression now seem extraneous, utterly pretentious and often have a wooden-soldier articulation.