I think I fundamentally like birds too much for the horror here to work for me. Like yeah, fuck up this weird rich lady who pranks people with live birds.
A pretty by-the-numbers "fear of the outsider" horror movie (well, more of a drama honestly). Hitchcock obviously knows how to direct a movie and there's some amazing shots of the birds congregating or Melanie tearing up the coastline in her little convertible, but I found myself pretty disengaged with the actual drama. None of the characters are particularly compelling, standing in mostly as archetypes of The Young/Old Woman, Scorned Lover, or Innocent Child rather than having developed motivations. The scenes where Mitch is slyly interrogating Melanie as her thinly concocted ruse is rapidly falling apart are hilarious in microcosm, but end up not mattering much as the film is mostly interested in the invasion of a small town's privacy and the disruption of an established family unit.
There's a lot of hand-wringing about whether Lydia, the bereaved widow, is actually jealous of Mitch's affection for Melanie or just scared of being left behind, but it's drawn in broad enough strokes that either or both can be true and it doesn't change the themes (one is just more sexist, but there's not a lot of liking women here anyway). In the end we learn that, believe it or not, a man can care for both his wife AND mother, so I guess all these silly women were just getting a bit hysterical. Annie, the ex, is the most interesting character as basically an alternate timeline of Melanie's plot, but we see very little of her before she's killed off screen in an act of sacrifice (something something maternal martyrdom, etc).
And there's just no getting away from the central fear being a conservative anxiety about city/rural divides. There's lipservice paid to Melanie being rich and spoiled and arrogant about her own importance, but this isn't a movie by class in any meaningful sense. It's not that Melanie is a member of the bourgeois elite, it's that she's not from around here, she doesn't understand the social dynamics, and she's potentially taking from them their favorite boy.
I'm not very familiar with Hitchcock so no idea where this normally sits in his canon, but was underwhelming given the impressive effects that went into making it. Could also be that my mom's being talking this up as the scariest movie she's ever seen my entire life, which I'll definitely be thinking about longer than the movie itself.
