Raising Cain: Collector's Edition

Brian De Palma's 1992 psycho-thriller stars John Lithgow as Carter Nix, a seemingly perfect husband and father who has multiple personalities buried under his gentle front, as well as a secret plan to kidnap children for psychological experiments concocted by his demented father. Lolita Davidovich plays his wife, who has an affair with a handsome man from her past (Steven Bauer), which brings out Cain (her husband's sadistic and violent personality) to take revenge on both. Raising Cain draws from Hitchcock's Psycho, the TV movie Sybil, the notorious Peeping Tom, and De Palma's own Dressed to Kill, but it flagrantly flaunts logic as it builds a narrative centered on the desires, fears, anxieties, and traumas of it characters and on the stylistic and formal experiments of the director. De Palma shot the film with the intention of creating a dense narrative structure filled with flashbacks and dreams, but he second-guessed himself and re-edited it in a linear fashion, which pointed up the logical gaps. The film was lambasted by critics but earned a strong following among some of De Palma's fans. This new "collector's edition" features both the theatrical release and the home video debut of a director's cut that reorders the film to De Palma's initial intentions, the latter creating a thriller that is more dreamlike and enigmatic, and more appropriate to the theatrical performance of Lithgow, bravura direction, and emotional momentum of the film. Extras include new cast and crew interviews, and a featurette on the restored version. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)