Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound Airs on ARTE with Ingrid Bergman and Salvador Dalí’s Dream Sequence

A single painting set on a surrealist canvas worth of melting perspectives meets psychoanalytic investigation on television screens as the 1945 psychological thriller sortiraparis.com reported The House of Doctor Edwardes will air on ARTE on October 25, 2026, at 21:00.

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in English under the title Spellbound (serie-news.com), the 110-minute film (serie-news.com) stars Ingrid Bergman as Dr. Constance Petersen (arte.tv), a dedicated psychiatrist at the Green Manor asylum in Vermont (arte.tv). Gregory Peck plays an amnesiac new director (sortiraparis.com) who arrives at the clinic to replace the retiring Dr. Murchinson (arte.tv). As strange incidents accumulate, Petersen realizes the man is an impostor suffering from severe memory loss (arte.tv) and hiding under a false identity while a shadow of murder hangs over him (sortiraparis.com). After the impostor flees the clinic, Constance manages to track him down and decides to help him (arte.tv), driven by the desire to heal the man she loves (arte.tv) as the narrative unfolds like a long journey through a labyrinth of symbols in search of truth (arte.tv).

Psychoanalysis and the Surrealistic Dream Sequence

Adapted from a novel by Francis Beeding (sortiraparis.com), the screenplay was shaped by producer David O. Selznick and writer Ben Hecht (sortiraparis.com) after Hitchcock began working on the adaptation with Angus McPhail in London in 1944 (arte.tv). The story moves forward like an analysis session, with each clue unlocking a part of the hero’s repressed past until a resolution unravels both the criminal riddle and the intimate trauma (arte.tv).

The film’s most striking set piece is its celebrated dream sequence (serie-news.com), designed in collaboration with surrealist painter Salvador Dalí (sortiraparis.com). Hitchcock sought to break with traditional, blurry cinematic dream tropes by enlisting Dalí to bring sharp architectural lines, infinite distances, and converging perspectives to the screen (arte.tv). The director explained in interviews with François Truffaut that he wanted Dalí because of the sharp aspect of his architecture, long shadows, and formless faces, though Dalí invented rather strange elements that could not be realized, such as a cracking statue and ants escaping to cover Ingrid Bergman (arte.tv).