Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” celebrates its 71st anniversary later this year, but rewatching it in March 2025, the movie plays differently than it ever has before.

If you’ve never seen it, or you need a refresher on the plot, the film stars James Stewart as a photographer who’s broken his leg and is confined to his New York City apartment while he recovers. Bored out of his mind after having been there for weeks, he starts looking out his window and spying on his neighbors, only to notice some one of them participate in some … suspicious activity, and he becomes obsessed with figuring out what’s really going on.

Watching the film again this week, I was struck by how many similarities there are to what we’re experiencing now. The modern equivalent of staring out the window at our neighbors seems to be looking into our phones, which give us a window to a much wider world, and I suspect a lot of us feel like we’re Stewart’s character, unable to actually do very much despite witnessing atrocities of varying degrees practically every day. Whether it’s bombs still being dropped on Gaza during a supposed ceasefire or watching Donald Trump and Elon Musk flout the rules and essentially dismantle the Constitution before our very eyes, there’s a brazenness to these world events that reminds me of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), the grim neighbor who barely bothers to disguise the crime he’s committed. There’s an arrogance to the character and to these modern-day figures — an expectation that there will never be any negative consequences for anything they do.

There are two especially terrifying moments in the movie. One is when Stewart is watching Grace Kelly’s character break into Thorwald’s apartment to get evidence that Thorwald has killed his wife, and Thorwald unexpectedly comes home and starts assaulting her. Stewart gasps and fidgets as he watches from afar, but he’s in a leg cast and temporarily stuck in a wheelchair — there’s nothing he can do to save her.  

The other terrifying moment comes during the ending of “Rear Window,” when Thorwald comes into Stewart’s apartment and assaults him. Stewart is able to put up a bit of a fight by using the flashbulbs on his camera to temporarily blind his attacker, but shining a light on this villain isn’t enough to stop him — he charges forward and ultimately hurls Stewart out of a window. Thankfully, in the movie, the police are there to break Stewart’s fall and arrest the bad guy. But considering that this country’s social safety net is part of what’s being actively eroded, and there don’t seem to be any legal consequences for war crimes or inciting or participating in an insurrection, it feels like we won’t be as lucky when our villains directly come for us.

Writer John Michael Hayes, adapting a short story by Cornell Woolrich and inspired by multiple real-life murders, tapped into something with this story — something universal that’s managed to hold up through McCarthyism, the Cold War, and any number of other metaphors audiences have applied to it over the past seven decades. (I had completely forgotten until just this minute that I’ve previously written about it as a metaphor for quarantined life during the earliest days of the pandemic.) Hitchcock, one of the most famous directors the world has ever seen, is probably best known for “Pyscho,” “Vertigo,” and several of his “wrong man” classics, but “Rear Window” just might be the most timeless film of his incredible career.

I spoke a little about the film on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below:

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