Raising Cain (1992) User Reviews

Underrated

[jluis1984 · 7/10 · 4 December 2005]

The Multiple personality disorder has been subject of stories ever since Stevenson's famous novel "The strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Here, in "Raising Cain", director Brian De Palma shows everything he learned from studying Hitchcock and gives us a good story of suspense that although flawed, it is very enjoyable and gives the chance to shine to the underrated actor John Lithgow.

Lithgow stars as Dr. Carter Nix, a brilliant psychologist that is spending a year at home in order to care for his little daughter. Jenny(Lolita Davidovich), his wife, is concerned that he is becoming obsessed with it, and her problems increases when she finds Jack Dante(Steven Bauer), an old lover who is interested in continue their affair. Little she knows that not only she'll have to face his husband Carter, but also his other personality, the evil Cain.

Many reviews have complained that there is never a mystery that Carter and Cain are the same person. Well, that is because it is never intended to be a mystery. This is a suspense movie. As Alfred Hitchcock used to say(and no doubt that De Palma knows it), suspense is in the fact that the audience knows more than the characters. We know that Cain can appear at any time, and how the characters react to him is what keeps us thrilled.

John Lithgow truly shines as the troubled Carter/Cain, in a role that brings back memories of his superb performance in "The Twilight Zone". Sadly for the movie, the rest of the actors give awful performances, Davidovich and Bauer have zero chemistry on screen, and almost no charm, so since their characters do not have redeeming qualities, one ends up wanting them to be killed by Cain.

One big exception is Frances Sternhagen, who in her little screen time steals the show. Watch her in an amazing sequence as her character, a retired psychologist, explains the mental disorder to the detectives. That sequence is typical De Palma's perfection and Sternhagen makes the most of it.

The script is for the most part OK, and so is the directing. Not De Palma's best, but certainly satisfying; his obsession with Hitchcock's suspense is notorious, but still he manages to give the movie his own style and while this do not save completely the movie, will be appreciated by those who enjoyed "Dressed to Kill" or "Sisters".

To summarize, it is a better than average movie with superb performances by John Lithgow and Frances Sternhagen. Don't watch it with high expectations and you'll be satisfied.

7/10.

A Great Psychological Thriller. A must for de Palma fans.

[carlykristen · 7/10 · 8 November 2006]

This has a seemingly convoluted plot. Carter (et al., played exceptionally well by John Lithgow) begins to grow strange when he learns that his wife is having an affair with her ex. He becomes more obsessed with their young daughter and a rash of kidnapping/ killings occur. His wife (Lolita Davidovich) must figure out if he is behind the crimes or if his "dead" father, who committed experiments on children to develop multiple personality disorders, is to blame. Whew…

What makes this film interesting, other than the above-stated reasons, is that they give away one of the twists at the very first scene. The audience is already aware that Carter has multiple personalities. What makes it more intriguing is that de Palma tricks the audience with constant flashbacks, dream sequences, and appearances made by "dead" people that are not really dead.

The film starts a tad slow during the first 15 minutes and seems Lifetime Channel worthy. But as the film progresses, it gets trippier and more Hitchcockian (paranoid, obsessive, and voyeuristic with a knock out ending). Oddly enough, this is rated "R", but for very little reason. There is no nudity, minimal sex, minimal violence, and no gore at all. Most of the violence is implied and the tension comes from the suspense built by de Palma, the disturbing subject matter, and dark atmosphere.

There are a few standout scenes that will creep the viewer out. My favorite was the hospital scene. It literally had me sinking into my couch as this thing slowly turns towards me. It scared the bejesus out of me and had me rewinding to catch a glimpse again. Other noteworthy scenes include the interrogation scene where Lithgow weaves in and out of his different personalities and the ending that is incredibly reminiscent of "Dressed to Kill".

Favorite Quote: "Hickory dickory dock. Cain has picked his lock. He did a bad deed and Josh comes to bleed. Hickory dickory dock."

DVD Extras: The barebones from Universal. Only Brief Production Notes and Original Trailer.

Bottom Line: A great psychological thriller. Gorehounds should pass though. A must for de Palma and Hitchcock fans.

Rating: 7/10

Essentially fluff... so bring out the popcorn

[TBJCSKCNRRQTreviews · 6/10 · 23 April 2012]

Jenny finds herself doubting if she is happy when her ex comes back into town... she reminds herself that she is married to the perfect man, an excellent psychiatrist who's taken time off his own practice to spend more time with their daughter, Amy. He is getting somewhat obsessive about it, though... almost like he's... studying her. De Palma goes so far in this homage to Hitchcock that the entire film is one big tribute to the master, and he plays with the camera as he also loves to do(we get a couple of long takes, one of them 4 full minutes, and one sequence has great use of slow-mo... not quite the subway scene in The Untouchables, of course), and we get a tension-packed, suspenseful psychological thriller(light, in the way that it uses the Hollywood approach to mental problems; it is actually a brutal, disturbing, bloody and violent piece with some strong sexuality... also setting it apart from Alfred's pictures - then again, he might have gone this far if the censorship laws had allowed for it, considering stuff like Frenzy), with a lot of the power coming from Lithgow's inherent creepiness(and he's perfectly cast, if some of what he's asked to do here is awkward... and do not look at the IMDb listings before watching, it will spoil a lot). The characters aren't bad(nothing spectacular, but likable and interesting enough), and the acting is plenty solid. This has a lot going on, especially as far as the plot goes(you may want to give it a second viewing just to make sure you picked up on everything that happened), and not only for a fast-paced movie that doesn't break 90 minutes. The chronology can really confuse you, as well as the score of surprises(and several fake-outs!). And at the end of the day, this is mainly meant to entertain you, and it lacks the kick of credible flicks. The DVD comes with a trailer. I recommend this to any fan of the director, star and the man whose body of work provided the inspiration. 6/10

Daddy knows best

[tieman64 · 6 June 2010]

"Surveillance didn't start with Nixon." – De Palma

Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain" typically gets compared to Hitchcock's "Psycho", but its got more in common with Kubrick's "The Shining". Here, like Kubrick's film, a seemingly nurturing father, Carter Nix, regresses into a unhinged, murderous male. Both films' "daddies" represent unchecked patriarchal rage, but whilst Kubrick's Jack Torrance is haunted by the ghosts of patriarchy, Carter Nix is literally possessed by his authoritarian father, whose abusive hands led to Carter developing multiple personalities.

Beneath its trashy exterior, "Raising Cain" is chiefly concerned with Nix's compulsion for control. Though he feigns compassion, Nix is emblematic of a breed of masculinist technocracy, obsessed with surveillance, cameras, discipline and actively engaged in a scheme to kidnap kids

Early scenes highlight this: television monitors show Nix comforting his young daughter, and then, shortly afterwards, telling a woman that "controlling early childhood development is essential in the creation of a wholesome personality". But while Nix hopes to traumatise kids in order to induce multiple personalities, he himself is fragmented (or displaced) because of his father's abuse. One of his many personalities is Cain, whom De Palma differentiates from Nix's other personalities by using canted noir angles. Cain marks the horrific return of the repressed id, which emerges as a ghost of a murderous past to unleash vengeance specifically on women and children.

Significantly, Cain's appearances are triggered when Nix is confronted with repressed fears and anxieties, not unlike the psychiatrist in De Palma's "Dressed to Kill". When Nix sees his wife having sex with Jack, her former boyfriend, Cain emerges and concocts a diabolical plot to murder Nix's wife. In typical De Palma fashion, however, the woman is magically resurrected. She then begins her mission to rescue her daughter from the hands of her deranged husband and his equally insane father.

Things get more complex when another one of Nix's multiple personalities, a figure called Margo, begins to take over Nix's personality. In a reversal of the transvestite role in De Palma's "Dressed to Kill", Margo becomes the maternal protector of Nix's multiple personalities.

In a slow motion sequences filled with phallic symbols, Margo then kills Nix's father as Nix's daughter falls into the arms of surrogate father Jack. Margo thus becomes at once the castrating female, the maternal id of Carter's multiple personalities, and the alter ego of Carter. In order for Carter to free himself of his father's tyranny and rescue his own childhood, as well as become the instrument in rescuing his daughter, he must become the maternal (m)Other. Though, as is often the case with De Palma's climaxes, there is some ambiguity about the final triumphant personality of Carter. Whether Margo is ultimately malevolent or benevolent is left up to the audience.

Like most horror films, whilst "Cain" opens up the possibility of a post-patriarchal future, it remains submerged in the patriarchal rage to which it calls attention. De Palma is doomed to be caught between his own critique of patriarchy and his inability either stylistically or ideologically to embrace a post-patriarchal future. He knows that only the release of monstrosities can destroy the forces that engendered them, but trapped in our historical moment, cannot concretize any prospect of change.

This has led to many feminist writers (for all the hate De Palma gets, feminists love him) leaping upon "Caine" as a symbol of post-Vietnam America and its patriarchal crisis. Nixon, wiretapping, government conspiracies and paranoia are common "themes" in the director's filmography, but with "Caine" it seems possible that the diabolical Dr. Carter Nix (two successive American presidents, Carter and Nixon?) is a cinematic analogue to the nefarious wiretapper Richard Nixon. Like Nix, Nixon traumatised a generation of young people in his perpetuation of war and the attendant repression at home against political dissidents. Moreover, Nixon's resignation after the disgrace of Watergate, like Nix Senior's exile after being charged with kidnapping children, represents an indictment of a patriarchal order that used its sons as sacrificial lambs in their mad designs. The reappearance of Nix Senior and the right-wing repressive patriarchal politics represented by Nixon in the figures of Reagan/Bush Senior suggest, for many feminist writers, a need to expose patriarchy's past.

Contrast De Palma's approach to these themes with that of his buddy Spielberg. With Spielberg, the castrated (loveable) father always retreats to a fantasy-scape of the past where he is restored and where there can exist no social fallout from his recuperation. Writing of this, Lynda Boose says: "America's post-Vietnam narrative is stamped with the intensity of a generation stuck in its own boyhood and now playing out, with increasing violence, an unconscious cultural myth that attempts to recover the father. The quest for the father - which might seem to be a reparative ideal - is dangerously regressive and invariably futile because what was required at the time of transition to adulthood cannot, by very definition, be incorporated twenty years later."

De Palma's cinema, however, exhibits the opposite trend. In his universe, the paternal super-ego, before its many De Palman castrations, is responsible for all manners of blood opera and baroque violence, women always the first to suffer, be it at the hands of the military, Hollywood, porn, capitalist exchange, organised crime and the various gender pressures delineated in "Sisters", "Carrie" and "The Fury".

Incidentally, "Caine" initially sported a very non-linear, radically different narrative structure. De Palma, however, reworked his scenes into something more conventional late in post-production.

7.9/10 – De Palma once said: "I spend a lot of time picking these architectural places precisely because they will take root in your subconscious. But the critics sort of dismiss it as nice camera work." By De Palma's standards, "Caine" features poor architecture.

A Fun Film

[clark_ricky · 7/10 · 19 January 2006]

Despite the hordes of comments made about this film explaining where it 'went wrong', it appears a great deal of these reviews are from viewers failing to recognise the directors tongue in cheek intentions.

The film is a satirical thriller/horror that abides by the conventions of the genre, though twists them. Instead of concentrating on what the audience doesn't know and building up to a yawn-full climax, a cliché that Scream parodies, the film takes on the perspective of the psycho, presenting the audience with more information than other characters.

The obvious influences, or should I say homages, to Hitchcock show De Palma's respect for his predecessors, though it appears De Palma is also presenting us with a parody of Psycho, which is a reason in itself to watch this movie.

Along with other directors (Including Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas), Brian De Palma has been labelled as a 'movie brat', and I think this film is a prime example of a film made by this generation of filmmakers.

not as bad as it could be!

[Chancery_Stone · 6/10 · 30 January 2001]

Yes, it's bad for the man who made Carrie, but it's not as bad as it might be. A lot of it is tongue-in-cheek (witness the long tracking shot of the pet psychologist explaining split personalities) and it has some terrific bizarre moments, not least the scariest drowning-in-a-car scene in film history. It's a very weird movie and John Lithgow gives a great camp performance in it. I don't know if Brian set out to make a schlocky trash movie but that's what he did, and as such, it's fun. Watch it and see.

Lesser De Palma still has its moments, plus Lithgow is very good

[Jeremy_Urquhart · 6/10 · 28 April 2022]

It's disappointing when a movie starts well and then kind of derails by the end the way Raising Cain does. I'd liken it to another De Palma film from the 90s, Snake Eyes. Each get off to a strong start and have good first halves, but become noticeably less interesting in the second half (though neither is terrible overall).

What works here is John Lithgow. He's really great, and shines when playing the various personalities that his character moves between (whether this is at all accurate about multiple personality disorder at all is a whole other matter, and I'd understand people finding it offensive and dismissing it if they did believe it was an unfair or potentially dangerous depiction).

Funnily enough, the movie starts to feel like it's splitting off in multiple directions, but not in a good or thematic way. Suddenly, Lithgow's wife has a voiceover? And a melodramatic infidelity subplot? Too much time's spent on it- if you have Lithgow doing great acting and it's cut away from so much!

Then there are other various characters who are all introduced awkwardly, and the finale is all a bit underwhelming... it's a shame, because this starts as a very promising psychological thriller, and ends up being a bit disposable by the end. For a good first half and somewhat shaky/not great second half, I think splitting the score halfway to be a 6/10 is fair.

Nothing Groundbreaking, but Not Bad

[truemythmedia · 6/10 · 16 June 2019]

This movie is fine; there are some really great moments in it, but for the most part it just feels like a slightly above par thriller. If you're looking for something to watch on a rainy Saturday morning, this isn't a bad film to land on. Lithgow is great fun to watch, De Palma's homages to Hitchcock are great, and the editing in the director's cut is pretty unique, but overall this film runs over ground already well tread upon.

Flawed, Conventional, Predictable and Poorly Written

[claudio_carvalho · 5/10 · 1 November 2015]

The psychologist Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow) leaves a park with his little daughter Amy and takes a ride with the mother of another child. He tries to convince her to leave her son travel to Norway for an experiment with his father but she does not accept. Dr. Nix uses chloroform to take her boy and leaves the unconscious woman in the trunk of her car with his brother Cain to get rid of her. His wife Dr. Jenny Nix (Lolita Davidovich) is worried about his obsession for Amy. When Jenny meets her former lover Jack (Steven Bauer) in a store, she has a love affair with him and plans to leave her husband. However Carter discovers their love affair and he kills a babysitter and leaves clues incriminating Jack. Then he suffocates Jenny with a pillow, puts her body into her car and submerges it in a swamp. Carter goes to the police department claiming that his wife and his daughter are missing. He also tells that he had seen a stranger in the park. Lt. Terri (Gregg Henry) and Sgt. Cally (Tom Bower) that are in charge of the investigation asks Carter to do a sketch of the suspect. However a veteran detective recalls the case of Carter's father and he summons Dr. Waldheim (Frances Sternhagen) that discloses how deranged his father was. Out of the blue, Jenny returns and now the police needs to find where the kidnapped children are.

"Raising Cain" is a deceptive thriller by Brian De Palma, with a flawed, conventional, predictable and poorly story. The plot is unbelievable, commercial and silly, with the strange situations easily resolved. How could Jenny escape from a car submerged in a swamp? Her infidelity that triggers completely madness in Carter becomes "politically correct". Jack saving Amy with the spear coming toward him is ridiculous. The conclusion might be a joke or a tribute to "Dressed to Kill". My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Síndrome de Caim" ("Cain Sindrome")

Good, dark, twisting little thriller

[Flora-9 · 7/10 · 6 March 2001]

After reading the reviews here I felt the need to defend this film. OK so it's not the best film in the world but what it is, is a good, dark twisting little thriller.

John Lithgow as Carter, Cain, Josh etc. is great and convincing in every role that he plays, as are the supporting players. The film is shocking, funny and sad.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!

Shocking is Jack's dying wife movements being reflected on the TV, funny is the character of Dr Waldheim and sad is the abuse inflicted on Carter by his dad.

END OF SPOILERS

If you go into the film expecting too much then you may well be disappointed but if you have no expectations and love black comedy then this film is for you. And compared with DePalma's most recent films (Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars) this film is a masterpiece, although obviously nowhere as good as Carrie.

Make crap.

[ddcharbon · 2/10 · 17 February 2020]

This movie is a mess. The plot is ridiculous; the sub-plot worse. And the actors seem to be mis-directed into hammy, over the top performances, which includes an oncologist coming on to her dying patient's husband at said dying patient's bedside; it feels like something out of a adult flick. There's also a lot of tin-can sounding voice over of characters' thoughts. Lithgow plays three different characters--the main character, his evil twin, and the father that warped them both with psychological experiments. Watching Lithgow is fun, but it's not enough to save this schlock.

Sisters meets Scream meets Lost Highway meets god knows what

[David Sticher · 10/10 · 1 March 2001]

Raising Cain is an awesomely baffling set of pomo hijinks care of the man De Palma. I can't blame the hordes of people who hate this movie for its nastiness and incoherency, but those are the reasons I love it so much. It's a total parody/homage/celebration of the kind of razor-inspired fun De Palma spent much of his career perfecting, with the fun (and intentionally self-destructive) gimmick of presenting the movie more or less from Carter's point of view.

With this, the movie trades conventional thrills, chills, and spills for a sneakier sort of fun. Instead of putting together the sort of hallucinatory bloodbath De Palma specialized in, he takes it apart. It's like he took all of his box-office successes, threw them in a blender, and kneaded the mixture into an extended nightmare sequence of half-remembered horrors, unreliable visual intake, and malformed cliches.

If you try to take it as a straight thriller, it'll never work. It's a thriller plot turned into a horror flick, where instead of being the brave wife protecting people from her deranged husband, we're the deranged husband, not sure where we are or who we are, doing terrible things we don't quite understand, in a dreamworld constructed entirely of cliches and stock terrors.

Scream would take the parody aspect into firmer territory and Lost Highway would take the insane protagonist aspect into firmer territory as well, and both of those films worked very well, but Raising Cain gets the ultimate thumbs-up from me for being constructed much like my own nightmares and for genuinely surprising me from time to time, not to mention for creating a feeling of urgency and sympathy for Carter.

If you're into really oddball flicks, give Raising Cain a chance.

*** 1/2 out of ****

[kyle_c · 7/10 · 1 December 2002]

De Palma's tongue-in-cheek twist on his own thriller formula works mainly as an inside joke for his fans - if you're looking for a standard formulaic suspense thriller, watch something else. Lithgow puts on a show with several superbly over-the-top performances. Some parts are scary, some suspenseful, and some hilarious, although they all have the mark of a virtuoso filmmaker - and they succeed because he doesn't take them seriously for a second. For De Palma fans, they don't get any more entertaining than this. However, non-fans might not get it.

Raising Cain (1992) BOMB

[JoeKarlosi · 1/10 · 14 November 2005]

I would call this a major disappointment if not for the fact that I've always heard it was pretty bad before I finally got around to seeing it. But it's still a major letdown in the sense that I generally enjoy Brian DePalma's films, so I was quite shocked that this was completely empty in every way. And to add insult to injury, DePalma even wrote this nonsense! It features John Lithgow as a crackpot with multiple personalities who kidnaps little children and is tormented by the memories of his equally nutty dad, who made him the basket case he is today. We're never quite sure what the point of everything is supposed to be; the plot is nowhere to be found. All we can surmise is that this detached husband/father has different people battling inside of him. Well, that may have been enough at one time in cinematic history, but by 1992 it was too old hat on its own to sustain interest. As bad as this movie is, I at least expected Lithgow to make a good looney bird; instead, his dopey characterizations come off as funny rather than intense or threatening. He adds nothing to the mix, and neither do the other actors nor their characters.

I didn't even get the usual vibe of intriguing direction from DePalma, and what very few instances of visual style I could see were things not only borrowed from Hitchcock (as we're now prepared to expect), but even DePalma's own DRESSED TO KILL (1980)! I found this dog to be completely without worth, and that's why I gave it my lowest rating. 0 out of ****

The New Director's Cut is a Must See

[Michael_Elliott · 13 September 2016]

Raising Cain (1992)

*** (out of 4)

Jenny (Lolita Davidovich) believes that her husband Carter (John Lithgow) is the perfect man but what she doesn't realize is that his father messed with his mind a little too much and now his past is going to come back and haunt him.

Brian De Palma's RAISING CAIN was always a very disappointing movie to me because I felt it had so much potential but it never fully came out in the film. Director Peet Gelderblom would eventually re-edit the movie in a cut known as RAISING CAIN RE-CUT and director De Palma would praise it saying that this version is what he originally wanted to do with the film but he regretted changing his mind at the last second. Now this "Director's Cut" is available on Blu-ray and we can finally see this film for what it was meant to be.

I'm not going to give away any major spoilers but it should be said that the Director's Cut contains every frame that was in the Theatrical Cut. The only difference between the two is the way that they are edited and I must say that it's really amazing how much better the Director's Cut is. In fact, after viewing this version it becomes a complete nightmare why someone as great as De Palma would turn in the Theatrical Cut because it just doesn't play very well and a lot of the build up in the suspense department is just lost.

What is also more apparent in the Director's Cut is the flow of the film. If you're familiar with De Palma's work then you already know that he loves to keep a certain style and flow in his films and it's much more clear in this cut of the movie. The opening scenes really set you up for the thriller that is going to follow and I thought the entire movie played much better. It certainly helps build up the suspense as the madness of the Lithgow character slowly builds until he eventually breaks. The "clues" that De Palma gives off are a lot more shocking when they finally reveal themselves as well.

The one great thing about whichever version you watched was the performance of Lithgow. He's playing multiple characters here with multiple personalities and he perfectly brings them to life and really creates a rather creepy and mentally disturbing character. I thought Davidovich was a bite too light here but we get some nice supporting performances including the one from Steven Bauer and Frances Sternhagen.

Most people considered RAISING CAIN a major disappointment but I would ask, or beg, those people to give the movie another chances in the Director's Cut. It really goes to show how important editing is and how a bad edit of a movie can ruin it.

Not a disaster, but really second rate De Palma

[rdoyle29 · 6/10 · 28 November 2017]

Lolita Davidovich runs into former boyfriend Steve Bauer and starts a steamy affair. Her husband John Lithgow has given up his psychiatric practice to raise their daughter, and she feels neglected as he devotes all his time to their kid. After a fairly bizarre series of dream sequences, she finds out her husband isn't who she thinks he is, kicking off an odyssey of psychotic twins, not-quite-so-dead fathers, murder, child kidnappings and split personalities.

I have seen this film a couple of times, and thought it was a brave attempt that didn't really work. I've now watched the new director's cut, and while it fixes some problems ... it still doesn't work. It fixes one major problem by not front-loading a lot of reveals about Lithgow and allowing more of the film to play out as a series of revelations. However, the first part that now focuses on Davidovich, is a fairly incoherent series of scenes of her suddenly waking up and pulling the rug out from under the viewer. Strangely, this cut seems to think that the viewer will be surprised by Lithgow's true nature, but really ... it so badly telescoped that I can't imagine anyone not seeing every surprise coming a mile away.

Truth be told ... many De Palma films relay on ridiculous plot twists and silly reveals, but they do so with style and elegance. This film ultimately fails because it substitutes weird, awkward staging and clumsy sequences where you expect elegance.

Revenge!

[grahamcarter-1 · 7/10 · 12 May 2017]

In 'Raising Cain' Brian DePalma is throwing a tantrum, and has tailored a film that includes all the elements that most of his critics despise. However, he wastes no time in telegraphing his intentions by utilising the very same Saul Bass style titles that were used in 'Psycho'. Carter is a child psychologist whose father, also a psychologist, used him as a test subject to examine the factors by which a young personality can be formed (shades of Michael Powell's 'Peeping Tom').

DePalma uses his director's muscle well at times, regardless of all the films obvious flaws. A scene between Cain and Dr. Nix in a motel room uses an approach similar to the high doorknobs in Argento's 'Suspiria', with Dr. Nix being filmed in an obviously undersized set making him larger, and Cain being filmed from an extreme high angle to put him in his place, and it is acted with heightened emotion and overplayed to absurdity… much like the film as a whole.

The film is from the get go a web of dreams, and watching '…Cain' and trying to pin down where reality stops, and dream states begin makes Carter / Cain / Dr. Nix / Josh / Margo's schizophrenia uncomplicated in comparison. DePalma turns the film's second act into a maze of dream sequences within flashbacks within fantasies and Jenny spends the rest of the film either waking up in the wrong bed, or dying violently, over and over. Yet, to assure us it all makes perfect sense, DePalma presents one of his long bravura traveling shots (reminiscent of 'Bonfire of the Vanities'), where Dr. Waldheim delivers a long annotated case history. The shot has them walking down stairs and catching elevators without a cut.

Melodramatic, broadly acted, with flashbacks/dream sequences and shock edits, and yet it almost feels like a telemovie as DePalma's normal sex and violence is so restrained. '…Cain' references Hitchcock, ('Psycho's' opening credits through to the car submerging in the lake). The climactic sequence at the motel finds DePalma touching base with his 'The Untouchables' (and therefore Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin'). His own 'Dressed To Kill' comes across with the elevator shenanigans, and the final surprise reveal shot is pure Argento 'Tenebre'. The park sequence is a nod to Argento's 'Four Flies On Grey Velvet', and the truck with the sundial suggests an event similar to Argento's 'The Bird With The Crystal Plumage' or 'Tenebre' is about to happen.

Perversely irresistible

[tomgillespie2002 · 7/10 · 6 August 2016]

After the critical and commercial public flogging he received for his bastardisation of Tom Wolfe's fascinating, multi-layered and often hilarious novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Brian De Palma turned back to the genre that had served him well early on his career, the psychological thriller. With crime 'biopic' The Untouchables (1987) and the hit-and-miss war drama Casualties of War (1989), De Palma has seemingly turned his back on the world of Hitchockian suspense, but his career was in serious danger. The result was Raising Cain, a movie so utterly ludicrous and ham-fisted that it's a wonder how he is still making movies. Yet, there's something perversely irresistible about the film.

Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow) is a respected psychologist suffering from multiple personality disorder, who, at the beginning of the movie, chloroforms a young mother and steals her child while being egged on by one of his cockier alter-egos, Cain. His wife Jenny (90's mainstay Lolita Davidovich) is concerned that Carter is spending too much time obsessing over their daughter, who he seems to view more of a subject of study than his own flesh and blood. Jenny rekindles a romance with a former flame, Jack (Steven Bauer), and the two are spotted by Carter making love in the woods. As Carter struggles to keep his many personalities in check, Jenny struggles to separate her dreams from reality.

While watching the movie, I kept wondering if this was truly the same De Palma who forged such well-constructed thrillers as Sisters (1973), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981); films that often carefully towed the line of B-movie daftness yet managed to stay grounded. Is Raising Cain a bad movie? Yes, probably. But with the casting of De Palma's favourite ham John Lithgow and its sickly, TV movie aesthetic, there's something oddly fascinating about its silliness. It attempts to confuse its already convoluted plot even further by staging scenes within dreams within memories within more dreams. While this is certainly frustrating, I was still rooted to my seat, desperate to see how this nonsense plays out. His films are often divisive, but Raising Cain had even the most hardcore De Palma fans questioning their loyalty. Personally, my love far outweighed the hate.

Put The Blame On Cain

[Lejink · 6/10 · 21 February 2022]

Silly title for a rather silly Brian De Palma thriller which nevertheless, once you park any expectations of realism or even seriousness, certainly entertains on a grand scale. I've read the word "camp" used around this movie and it's certainly justified with a cross-dressing, split personality John Lithgow who contributes a performance so over-the-top, he could look down on Everest from where he is.

He's Carter the ordinary, average, supportive husband of his altogether more glamorous, high-flying wife, Jenny, played by the wonderfully-named Lolita Davidovich, a brain surgeon who crosses the old doctor/patient line with the handsome husband, Steven Bauer, of one of her recently deceased brain-damaged patients who inconveniently has her fatal final attack just when the doc and the visiting hubby are - ahem! - otherwise distracted. Some time later, the two meet again by chance in a gift shop and their spark is rekindled although the way that she actually ends up in his bed couldn't be more contrived if it was an official governmental statement.

The other main plot strand concerns the disappearance of various infant children, which brings us back to Lithgow, who along with a seemingly evil twin brother and dastardly scientist father, kidnaps the kids for mean old dad to carry out his nefarious experiments.

It gets even crazier as we're introduced to a bewigged female psycho-analyst, a murder attempt involving a sinking car, lifted, surprise surprise, from the end of "Psycho", more murders and kidnappings and a big slow-motion finale where he re-uses a pram as a prop a few years after one crossed Eliot Ness's path as well as delivering a neat final shock-shot just for good measure.

At times, with its glossy, stylised visuals, soft-core sex-scenes and re-heating of many of his previous ideas, you sometimes think that this is the work of a devoted film student homaging De Palma the way he did Hitchcock years before, but even if it is ridiculously ludicrous and peopled with cardboard characters acting silly in more ways than one, there's always some camera-angle or surprise sequence occurring just around the corner to catch and usually hold your attention.

DePalma's Silly Psycho-Movie Sucks

[StrictlyConfidential · 2/10 · 20 May 2020]

This utterly demented Thriller quite clearly tells us all exactly why having multiple personalities doesn't always add up to good entertainment.

Like - Just take actor, John Lithgow here, playing a pair of murderous, multiple personality twins in "Raising Cain" - As Josh/Cain Nix (or whoever), Lithgow constantly goes way-way over-the-top no matter what character (?) he's playing.

And, soon enough it all becomes downright ludicrous and, yes, unintentionally laughable, just to watch this unconvincing fool become yet another persona.

Believe me - This is one distastefully screwy movie where neither the chills, nor the thrills, nor even the unintentional chuckles, add up to very much, at all.

Lithgow Creeps

[matthewrickman-28602 · 7/10 · 27 April 2022]

John Lithgow gets a great multi-role arc to play in De Palma's bizarre domestic thriller about the son of a child psychiatrist who might be having a complete break from reality and starts becoming different people who mean his family harm. It's not De Palma's finest work and he repeats himself a bit, but it's always at least amusing.

An Unmitigated Disaster

[wlverine-2 · 1/10 · 26 June 1999]

Brian De Palma has had his periodic successes (e.g., The Untouchables), which perhaps makes it all the more frustrating to witness something like Raising Cain, which - after much consideration - I would have to say is one of the five worst movies I have ever seen. That he wrote the screenplay is one more reason to be upset.

The storyline is laughable, the acting is uniformly dreadful (even credible actors like Lithgow and Davidovich offer cringe-worthy performances), De Palma's blatant I-wish-I-were-Hitchcock direction has never been more pitiful - or unsuccessful - and the movie's climactic scene is so inane, so obviously contrived (if you _must_ watch this, you'll see what I mean by the truck carrying the sundial doing nothing the entire climax except strategically backing up and going forward), that you will be tempted to simply turn off the VCR. Let me save you the temptation: just don't rent it at all.

Here We Are, On Familiar Ground

[nycritic · 8/10 · 16 June 2006]

Brian de Palma was once a great director who could do magic with his keen sense of suspense that paid a heavy homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Sergei Eisenstein. However, he tried to sever himself from his patent themes of choice and tackled other genres. While he excelled with his crime drama THE UNTOUCHABLES, he failed miserably with THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES.

So by 1992 he decided (like most directors of a known style going through a bad patch) to go back to what he was known for. One problem, though. Assuming the role of screenwriter became his big misstep because as much as the idea works on paper, his dialog almost ruins the movie. It's the same thing that affected DRESSED TO KILL in which Nancy Allen was given some horrendous lines to say even when that film is a fantastic exercise in suspense and a correct reconstruction of a well-known story -- that of PSYCHO.

However, de Palma creates a masterful dream-like world not that different thematically from the worlds of Luis Bunuel and his bourgeois, caught in the middle of their own frenzied dreams which are harbingers of nightmares, waking up to find they may still be in the middle of something not quite real. The story opens up layers upon layers of mystique and mystery and reveals information only in fits and spurts, which leaves us in a state of wondering what the hell are we watching at times.

Indeed, it may take one more view to get the impenetrable mess that RAISING CAIN is, and this is due to the fact that so many of Carter's personalities come forth like an unseen cast operating only under John Lithgow's chameleon-like persona. In showing the two characters battling for the upper hand by placing Lithgow being a tree, for example -- a technique Peter Jackson would use for scenes in which Gollum and Smeagol shared their twisted, tragic banter about the wretched Ring in his LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS -- he has one of the best moments of duplicity ever seen on screen, and one that doesn't need split screens or special effects to be potent.

But interesting as well is how another character is introduced, also under the persona of Lithgow. Margo, a kind woman, is only described by Lithgow's own words as being one "who looks after the children." I find it interesting that for Carter to be set free he has to let this female personality come forth and lead him to sure escape. As to whether she will remain as a dominant personality when she appears in the final reel remains a mystery but like Bunuel films, it's there, unexplained, shown mainly for a shock tactic a la UN CHIEN ANDALOU, but in a less threatening way.

RAISING CAIN is a pretty slick movie that should be seen at least twice. There is so much happening with its plot, and so much interpretations that can be given to the dreams that blend in with the reality which in itself may be a dream that it may well be one of his better films, underrated because of the fracas of BONFIRE. It's intoxicating, and a Brian de Palma movie, this is it, hands-down. Every scene is a hoot to watch: it's as if the director had a huge bag of tricks that were part of his style and he had decided to let them all out in a flood of images and great sequences. And this is not something directors of a certain vision can say they do. I have to say I loved every homage and element thrown in. The dream within a dream sequence, Dr. Waldheim's (Frances Sternhagen) explanation that follows her throughout a winding set of hallways before having the camera zoom in on a victims horrified face, Carter's wife Jenny's (Lolita Davidovich) sudden awakening inside a car that is sinking into a swamp (another PSYCHO link) and the final showdown happening at several levels and in slow motion. If anyone can do high suspense today, it's de Palma.

Stops rather short of the hellzapoppin' it ought to have been

[CuriosityKilledShawn · 6/10 · 4 April 2019]

I'm not a fan of Brian De Palma at all and most of his films really grind on me. It amazes me that so many people fawn over his works. There are a couple that I do enjoy though, such as Carlito's Way or the climatically flawed Snake Eyes. Raising Cain is strictly middle-of-the-road.

John Lithgow is Carter Nix, a lovely husband and dad with a dark secret. He's really several people. Or is he? There's a wonderful Hitchcockian streak here and it borrows liberally from Psycho, Vertigo, and maybe even Rear Window in that we're never quite sure what we're looking at. Lithgow is, as usual, fun to watch, and the small supporting cast including the always underused Lolita Davidovich as his cheating wife (is there any other kind?) works well with the material, it's just a shame that De Palma stops short of going completely over-the-top, which is really what this movie needed.

After purchasing this Blu-ray I learned about the unusual circumstances of the "director's cut" and of how it is only available on the limited edition Blu-ray, not the single disc I got. Apparently there is only a 7-second difference, with the cut being a rearranging of the scenes, but I feel stupid now. No masterpiece for sure, but an odd little thriller.

A confusing mess that even John Lithgow can't save

[moodorf · 4/10 · 15 February 2020]

For the record I think John Lithgow is a great actor. Having said that, this movie is a mess. The dream sequences don't help the film and the jumping around in the narrative's timeline was not done well. The fact that Cain is a figment of Carter's imagination is way too obvious way too early into the film.

The dream sequences distort what's real or what isn't whenever they occur in this movie, and not in a good way (ie: a David Lynch arty sort of way) What made me turn this movie off was when they show Carter's wife drowning in a car pushed into a lake by Cain. A few scenes later the police are viewing her body and noting that her fingernails were raw from trying to "claw her way out of the car"

Then about 5 minutes later she's back in the movie totally alive with no explanation as to what the hell happened, attacking Carter.

At that point I realized I couldn't really trust what was happening in the movie and decided it wasn't worth it anymore.

4/10