Rear Window makes you the detective, then makes you feel bad about it

A photographer with a broken leg watches his neighbours across a courtyard, becomes convinced one of them has committed a murder, and can do nothing about it because he cannot leave the room.

The constraint is the design

The film almost never leaves the apartment. Everything you learn, you learn by looking out of the same window the protagonist is looking out of, at the same distance, with the same inability to hear.

This puts the audience in exactly his position — including his epistemic problem. You are not shown the crime. You are shown a set of ambiguous fragments and you assemble them, and the film knows you are doing it.

The uncomfortable part

You spend the film hoping a murder has been committed. If the neighbour is innocent, the protagonist is a voyeur who has been slandering a grieving man, and so are you.

Hitchcock is entirely aware of this and keeps pressing on it. The other windows show a lonely woman, a struggling composer, newlyweds — private lives being consumed as entertainment by a man with nothing better to do, which is also a description of watching a film.

The craft

The whole courtyard is a set, built to scale, with working apartments and lighting rigged for time of day. Once you know, the depth of it is remarkable.

Watch it if

You want the purest version of the genre’s central pleasure: assembling a conclusion from partial information, and being made to notice that you wanted a particular answer.