“Rope” is a film that’s less like a meal and more like the aftertaste that lingers long after you’ve left the restaurant—a bit sour, unsettling, but impossible to forget. Hitchcock doesn’t just invite you to dinner here, he ties you to the chair and forces you to watch as your hosts discuss the finer points of murder over cocktails and canapés.

The setup is a couple of privileged, snobbish bastards who strangle their friend, stuff his body in a chest, and then host a dinner party with the corpse as the unspoken guest of honor. If you think this is subtle, you probably put ketchup on your steak. There’s a queasy thrill as you watch these two try to act casual, all the while the clock is ticking and the tension, like a well-aged cheese, gets funkier by the minute.

The entire film unspools in real time, as if Hitchcock is daring you to sweat along with the killers. It’s a tightrope act—claustrophobic, theatrical, and pulsing with the sense that something, or someone, is about to snap. Jimmy Stewart waltzes in as the moral compass, looking at the proceedings like a chef who finds a finger in his soup—disgusted but morbidly fascinated.

There are no car chases, no dramatic escapes, just the uncomfortable intimacy of guilt, arrogance, and the soft clink of silverware. “Rope” is what happens when you let your worst impulses marinate too long in a sauce of ego and intellectual vanity. It’s not comfort food. It’s more like eating fugu: one wrong move and it’s all over.

Watch it. Just maybe don’t plan dinner right after.