Cinema historian and filmmaker Mark Cousins is best known in Australia for his landmark survey series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which opened a wide and inclusive lens on the development of cinema culture worldwide.

Here, Cousins zooms in on a pivotal figure instead – Alfred Hitchcock – and takes an inventive deep dive into the director’s films.

Cousins’ idiosyncratic narration is absent this time. Instead, he has The Master of Suspense himself do the talking, over two hours’ worth of masterfully curated and connected clips from films dating back to the silent era (The Lodger), encompassing Hitch’s Hollywood classics (Vertigo, Psycho, Marnie, etc.) and including some overlooked (rightly in some cases) late-career movies like Frenzy and Family Plot. In fact, very few movies in his catalogue are overlooked.

A still from the documentary My Name is Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock died in 1980, but his instantly familiar voice is recreated for this project by actor-impressionist Alistair McGowan. Speaking, as it were, from beyond the grave, it is an uncannily accurate voicing – droll, slightly slobbery and revealing of Hitchcock’s suburban London roots.

Cousins doesn’t use any archival...