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Critics Consensus: Raising Cain doesn't rank with Brian De Palma's best work, but John Lithgow's spellbinding split-personality performance makes this thriller hard to dismiss.
Critic Consensus: Raising Cain doesn't rank with Brian De Palma's best work, but John Lithgow's spellbinding split-personality performance makes this thriller hard to dismiss.
All Critics (35) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (20) | Rotten (15) | DVD (2)
"Raising Cain" is one for the books-a thrilling, funny, exciting and creepy exercise in suspense and humor from a master filmmaker firing on all cylinders.
That's the stuff of scary melodrama, especially with children in jeopardy. Unfortunately, DePalma fails to deliver real fright or titillation to his target audience, instead opting for satire.
Lithgow is consistently brilliant, while Davidovich makes a good fist as his wife. A really exciting 90 minutes worth, so long as you don't take it too seriously.
A delirious thriller starring John Lithgow as a man with at least three more personalities than he really needs, finds Mr. De Palma creating spellbinding, beautifully executed images that often make practically no sense.
Still, the failure to go beyond implication blunts the movie's power and leaves De Palma stranded. As a result, the film becomes merely a scary prank. It's as if he forgot why he was making the movie in the first place.
De Palma always winds up letting his worst instincts get the better of him.
It's a diabolical idea taken to deliriously absurd extremes by De Palma.
While film fans might enjoy DePalma's stylistic homages to Hitchcock, and John Lithgow's total commitment to concept and character, there is little else to recommend about Raising Cain.
De Palma blurs the line between fantasy and reality with gleeful affrontery, creating a dazzling tapestry of visual cheats and narrative trickery which propels his scarcely credible characters and ludicrous plot through to its nervy conclusion.
Movies don't get much more De Palma than 'Raising Cain,' and in its new and improved form, it can finally get the praise it deserves.
An off-center carbon copy of De Palma's superb 1980 hit Dressed to Kill, coming off as hokey and jokey rather than clever and suspenseful.
works superbly in its isolated setpieces, even as the film as a whole doesn't quite hang together
While not quite as crazy it's main character(s), Raising Cain has some pretty nuts twists and turns. Not DePalma's best, but far from his worst too.
Super Reviewer
A misunderstood movie that is almost as bizarre and comical in nature as Body Double. Brian De Palma’s style really shines here, due to the fact that he plays perfectly with insanity. His shots make sense more than they do in some of his other work. To make this what it is though, it wouldn’t be complete without someone like John Lithgow. He gives such a scarily funny performance(s) as a man gone crazy in four different ways. The plot is very much a homage to Psycho, but even more on the edge of insanity. Whether it’s kidnapping babies or dressing like Margot, Carter is quite the multiple personalities victim. I would only suggest watching it if you get Brian De Palma’s style, otherwise you will be completely lost and write it off as silly.
Very good, once I could figure out what was going on!
This thrillers' content is very disturbing, so not for the faint-hearted. An evil Dr performs strange experiments on children.
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