Psycho.

Gus Van Sant has not only filmed Joseph Stefano's script of Hitchcock's Psycho without rewriting it, he's reproduced nearly all of the staging as well. Nearly, because what may be most interesting to viewers who know the original well is the way Van Sant has sneaked in minute differences within several shots and scenes, mischievously tweaking our memories of the 1960 classic without changing the story.

For example, in the famous opening scene, Hitchcock's camera floated through the window of a hotel room to discover Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in a white bra and half-slip watching her lover put on his clothes after their lunch-hour tryst. I think the sight of Leigh in dishabille jump-started the puberty of many a pre-adolescent boy like myself, but Van Sant's camera treats his Marion, Anne Heche, like the most gallant of peeping toms by staying pretty much above her collarbone. Her lover, however, is displayed in full dorsal nudity. A gift to female and gay audience members? In any event, we can sense the director winking at us.

Some of these innovations don't work so well: as the detective Arbogast is slashed to death, Van Sant inserts some nearly subliminal shots of a ghostly nude woman and an equally ghostly winding road. Are these the private eye's last thoughts before death? But they mean nothing to us, since we haven't been privy to Arbogast's private life.

Such details are strictly for connoisseurs of the old Psycho. What will strike the rest of the audience is the difference the new cast makes, and it's precisely here that we encounter the real superiorities and inferiorities of this remake.

The good news: Julianne Moore makes Marion's sister gutsy, attractive, and infinitely preferable to the drab Vera Miles of 1960. As Marion's lover, Viggo Mortensen is not at his best here but his virile surliness has more to offer than anything the Arrow-shirt-model-posing-as-an-actor John Gavin could provide. Simon Oakland, the original psychiatrist, made the final summarizing speech sound so glib that the movie suddenly lurched into satire. The new shrink, Robert Forster, takes it slowly and ploddingly and makes you feel that the doctor himself is rather surprised by his own conclusions. Thus, the speech comes out fresh.

The bad news: Bill Macy, fine actor though he is and certainly competent here, does not radiate the assurance Martin Balsam employed as the detective to lull the audience into thinking that this man will put everything to rights, a lull that is shockingly exploded in the second murder scene. Macy, with his endearing Howdy Doody face (well-used in Pleasantville), has Potential Victim written all over him.

Mixed news: Anne Heche has neither Janet Leigh's wonderful body nor her way of making Marion so maternal that she fails to heed the strain of madness within Norman's pathos. But Heche has something that almost compensates: a pertness, an elfin wit that is interesting here but would be better employed in a screwball comedy, if only screwball comedies were made any more.

Crucially, Vince Vaughn replaces Anthony Perkins's gangliness with thick-necked bluffness and a convincing mask of All-American normality. In a way, this makes the new Norman even more frightening than Perkins's, as if one of the Beach Boys had morphed into Charles Manson. But, let's face it, though Vaughn is excellent, Perkins was beyond excellence: he made neurosis mythic and added an unusual and unusually appealing monster to the American Gothic landscape.

Joseph Stefano's screenplay (from Robert Bloch's novel) remains a model of concision in its plotting and a repository of sinister vibrations in its dialogues. And, since the script hasn't been altered, here is a 1990s adult film without the F word. Bernard Herrmann's score, now Wagnerized by Danny Elfman, is still like hearing the action accompanied by lightning. Not lightning as the prelude to thunder but as the deadly force already zigging through your body.