Movie · 1948 · Thriller, Crime, Drama · 1h 21m · PG · English
Curator score: 8.7/10 (468.7K ratings)
It begins with a shriek...it ends with a shot! From beginning to end, nothing ever held you like Alfred Hitchcock's ROPE!
Overview
Two young men attempt to prove they committed the perfect murder by hosting a dinner party for the family of a classmate they just strangled to death.
Ratings
Curator score: 8.7/10
IMDb: 7.9/10
Letterboxd: 4.14/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
Metacritic: 73
TMDB: 7.9/10
Director
Alfred Hitchcock
Production
Transatlantic Pictures
Cast
James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger, Cedric Hardwicke, Constance Collier, Douglas Dick, Edith Evanson, Dick Hogan, Joan Chandler, Alfred Hitchcock
Curator Review
Verdict
A razor-sharp, high-concept thriller that turns a murder into a social experiment, with Hitchcock using real-time tension, elegant staging, and darkly charged performances to make a single-room dinner party feel unbearable. Its technical audacity and subtext-rich character dynamics make it a landmark even when the theatrical gimmick is more fascinating than emotionally deep.
Best for
Hitchcock fans
viewers who like chamber-piece thrillers
fans of queer subtext and coded classic Hollywood
people interested in formal experimentation
crime stories built on tension rather than action
Skip if
you want fast pacing or constant plot twists
you dislike stagey, dialogue-heavy films
you prefer explicit psychological realism over subtext
you are impatient with older filmmaking styles
Overview
Rope is one of Hitchcock’s boldest formal experiments: a murder story staged as if in a single continuous take, unfolding in real time inside one apartment. That constraint becomes the engine of the film’s suspense, forcing every glance, pause, and misplaced object to carry menace.
Worth noting
What makes it endure is not just the technical bravado, but the deliciously poisonous social setup. The dinner-party civility, the smug intellectual posturing, and the escalating suspicion all create a pressure cooker that feels both theatrical and cinematic. James Stewart’s late-arriving moral force gives the film a jolt of unease that keeps the premise from becoming merely clever.
Bottom line
It’s also a movie that has become central to conversations about queer coding and repressed desire in classic Hollywood, which adds another layer to its already unstable psychology. The result is a stylish, chilly, and perversely funny thriller that remains easy to admire and hard to forget.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Aaron Michael (4★) · 11979 likes
This is so gay. I mean, this is SO gay. Maybe you think you know how gay this is. Maybe you thought, "Oh, this is a lil gay" or "Oh, I'm sensing some undertones of homo-eroticism." Except you were wrong because this is perhaps the gayest movie in the history of gay movies and I loved every single second of it.
Oh yeah, good long takes, too.
Chris 🍉 (4.5★) · 10107 likes
imagine being phillip and you just want to have a nice gay vacation in the country with your boyfriend but he turns out to be a homicidal maniac
mia lee vicino (4★) · 8534 likes
what’s up with dudes who went to harvard and accusing their friends of chicken cruelty
georgina (4★) · 6949 likes
fellas is it gay to murder your friend just to impress your prep-school housemaster?
beca (4★) · 5566 likes
hot tip: when you're deciding which one of your friends to kill so you can have a murderous dinner party, don't kill the guy who's never late to parties..
1949 · Thriller, Mystery · 1h 45m · NR · Curator 9.6/10 (377K ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, IndieFlix, Cineverse, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A postwar thriller with sharp atmosphere, hidden motives, and a morally compromised social world.