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Raising Cain, Brian De Palma’s maddening dissociative identity disorder thriller, remains one of the director’s most inscrutable films three decades later.

“Does Carter know what he did?”
“Carter didn’t do anything. Cain did all the killing.”

Brian De Palma is an absolute master visual storyteller and his movies are always cinematically stunning even when they don’t fully work as films. For every Carrie and Blow Out there’s a Snake Eyes and The Black Dahlia, but Snake Eyes still kicks off with a twelve-and-a-half minute unbroken tracking shot and Black Dahlia turns the camera into an airborne omniscient spectator during its dynamic gangland shootout and simultaneous corpse discovery. 1992’s Raising Cain comes at an important period of transition for De Palma. Sandwiched between The Bonfire of the Vanities and Carlito’s Way–ostensibly the two extremes of De Palma’s career–it’s easy for Raising Cain to get lost in the shuffle despite its completely gonzo nature and scenery-chomping performance from John Lithgow. 

Raising Cain is the story of Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow), a revered child psychologist who experiences a mental break and struggles to stay in control when other identities fight for authority. A hostage in his own body, Carter heads down a dark path that endangers his entire family while he relives his painful past. Raising Cain, for decades, was criticized for its confusing construction and was even viewed by some to be De Palma’s attempt at satire of his tried-and-true genre of choice. In reality, Raising Cain is an earnest–perhaps too earnest–movie that’s been misunderstood for a different reason altogether. Now, on its 31st anniversary, Raising Cain has become even more fascinating on a meta-narrative level. The film has turned into this bifurcated, jumbled experience that tries to messily reconcile many different ideas and tones at once through its two exceptionally distinct edits, like Carter’s own fractured psyche.

Seasoned De Palma fans will recognize how Raising Cain plays all of the director’s trademark hits, but those who aren’t already into De Palma’s style and aesthetic will have little to connect with in the heightened movie. It’s definitely a polarizing De Palma title, even for the hardcore fans, but Peet Gelderblom’s “director’s cut” edit does deliver a better version of this movie that creatively plays with non-linear storytelling. This might have been confusing in the early ‘90s, but audiences would learn to love this structural technique only a few years later with Pulp Fiction and Memento. It’s curious to consider how this avant-garde approach, if left undisturbed, might have come across as revolutionary rather than confusing, which was the fear. The theatrical cut attempts to bury, hide, and normalize these unique flairs–not unlike what’s done to Carter to smooth out his wrinkles so that he’s the most conventional, boring, mainstream version of himself. It’s another powerful, albeit unintentional meta element to Raising Cain that still rings true and makes the story behind the film and its two separate versions almost as interesting as the movie itself.

The divergent responses to the two cuts of Raising Cain emphasizes the “power of the edit.” The theatrical cut of Raising Cain, while chaotic, still led to a sect of audiences who believed that it’s meant to operate on dream logic and that it’s not supposed to make sense. The belief is that it’s ludicrous that De Palma has done so many better versions of this type of movie and that the audience knows that De Palma knows better. This dream logic rationale to Raising Cain’s theatrical cut may work, but it wasn’t De Palma’s original intention. Nevertheless, two complementary and contrasting movies can be born out of the same story, all depending on how it’s told and its dominant perspective. It would have been better if De Palma’s original vision could have made its way into theaters, but if any of his movies needs to suffer an identity crisis through its edit then it’s at least appropriate that it’s Raising Cain. 

Raising Cain is dense with De Palma’s typical themes of dishonest women, overbearing fathers, and unhealthy familial relations between the three. It’s hard not to think of De Palma’s own frayed relationship with his doctor dad when Carter gets abused and mocked by his father, even if De Palma hasn’t acknowledged the connection between the two himself.

masterful five-minute Steadicam tracking shot in the police department. This sequence initially feels equally gratuitous, but it’s at least technically impressive and proof that De Palma knows how to uniquely block a scene that would otherwise just be clunky dialogue. De Palma plays with the audience as intense exposition is delivered and the camera careens around this police department and keeps the audience visually on their toes while they must stay on top of the avalanche of information that inundates them. Fresh theories are introduced and dismissed by the end of the unbroken tracking shot. Later, a masterful three-storey blocking exercise at a motel during the film’s final set piece allows the camera to freely move across the building and parse out tiny details on each level of the motel before they all impossibly connect together. Raising Cain gives audiences the best and worst of De Palma’s visual flairs and compulsion to creatively tell this story through the camera, just like how the film presents the best and worst of Carter.

De Palma was disappointed with Raising Cain’s theatrical cut, but it’s ironically one of his most financially successful movies (it more than tripled its reported $12 million budget). “It worked out rather well, as strange as it may seem,” discloses De Palma in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s documentary on the filmmaker’s career. It’s a very compartmentalized view on his years with Gale Anne Hurd (their marriage from 1991-1993 is close to exactly the tenure in which they made this movie), the family they started, and him going back to his comfort zone. The two would part ways and go back to “the lives they hadn’t finished” in De Palma’s words. Oddly enough, this doesn’t mean a huge push for more sexual thrillers from De Palma, but Instead glitzier, grittier crime dramas in the vein of The Untouchables, and Scarface, with Carlito’s Way being his next film.

31 years after its initial release, Raising Cain is finally being properly appraised and viewed as the ambitious oddity that it was intended to be thanks to Peet Gelderblom’s dedicated work on the film’s director’s cut (which De Palma himself approved of and included on Raising Cain’s 2016 Shout Factory Blu-ray release). De Palma has disappeared from the spotlight in recent years and his last major studio release was 2006’s The Black Dahlia. Despite these struggles, De Palma’s works continue to resonate with modern audiences and it’s easy to forget that he was responsible for kickstarting the still-running Mission: Impossible film series. Hopefully De Palma has at least one or two more films in him and, if so, that they’ll conjure Raising Cain’s chaotic energy and take big swings in a genre that De Palma lives and breathes. In Raising Cain during a crucial conflict, Cain brashly shouts at his other half, Carter, “Don’t be so obvious!” One can’t help but imagine De Palma voicing the same sentiments towards the current crop of studio thrillers.