Body Double debuted to a divided response; positive reviews praised the visual style and the performances, while negative reviews criticized the plot, described the Hitchcock homages as derivative, and lambasted the sex and violence as vulgar. Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "D+" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert praised the film, giving it three and a half out of four stars and calling it "an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking, a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition in which there's no particular point except that the hero is flawed, weak, and in terrible danger – and we identify with him completely."
Vincent Canby of
The New York Times wrote that De Palma "again goes too far, which is the reason to see it. It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film (
Vertigo), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies." Writing for
The Day, Paul Baumann said, "This is one movie that can make the horrific fascinating and still underline, in a hilarious way, the absurdity of it all." The
Schenectady Gazettes Dan DiNicola wrote, "I could not resist [the film's] visual brilliance which without malice or cynicism holds up a mirror to the 'nature' of millions of American viewers." Griffith received critical acclaim for her performance,
David Denby of
New York gave a mixed review, but raved about De Palma's "gliding, sensual trancelike style that is the most sheerly pleasurable achievement in contemporary movies." Denby singled out the scene set at the Rodeo Collection mall, writing "virtually wordless, this sustained episode accumulates a kind of suspense that is as much moral and psychological as physical".
Paul Attanasio of
The Washington Post positively reviewed the film, writing, "A lewd, gory, twisty-turny murder mystery swirling around Hollywood's porn industry,
Body Double finds Brian De Palma at the zenith of his cinematic virtuosity. The movie has been carefully calculated to offend almost everyone—and probably will. But, like Hitchcock, De Palma makes the audience's reaction the real subject;
Body Double is about the dark longings deep inside us." Negative reviews opined De Palma was returning to familiar territory by riffing on Hitchcock. In
The New Yorker,
Pauline Kael shared "the big, showy scenes recall
Vertigo and
Rear Window so obviously that the movie is like an assault on the people who have put De Palma down for being derivative. This time, he's just about spiting himself and giving them reasons not to like him. And these big scenes have no special point, other than their resemblance to Hitchcock's work."
Sheila Benson of the
Los Angeles Times panned the film as "elaborately empty" and "silly", suggesting that De Palma "finally may have exhausted the patience of even his most tenacious admirers." Kael added that "the voyeuristic sequences, with Wasson peeping through a telescope, aren't particularly erotic; De Palma shows more sexual feeling for the swank buildings and real estate."
TV Guide wrote, "Contrived, shallow, distasteful, and ultimately pointless,
Body Double is more an exercise in empty cinematic style than an engrossing thriller. Although cinematographer
Burum executes some absolutely breathtaking camera moves, his effort goes for naught when pitted against director De Palma and cowriter Avrech's insipid narrative." Rita Kempley of
The Washington Post described the film as a
horror comedy, but said it comes off as "sadistic" and does not find a balance "between the comic and the macabre". In the scene, the woman is killed by a power drill; though the drill is never shown entering the victim's body, it is suggestively framed as a
phallus. In a review that awarded two-and-a-half stars out of four,
Gene Siskel of the
Chicago Tribune wrote, "When the drill came onto the screen, De Palma lost me and control of his movie. At that point
Body Double ceased to be a homage to Hitchcock and instead became a cheap
splatter film, and not a very good one at that." In contrast, David Denby noted the film's "violence is so outlandish that only the literal-minded should be able to take it seriously", and argued that its gaudiness appears to address De Palma's detractors "who talk of violence in his films as if it were the real thing", or those who cannot distinguish between the image and actual violence. The London Clinic for Battered Women asked Columbia Pictures for a percentage of the profits from the film, claiming it was "
blood money" for using "the victimization of women as a source of massive profit." In response to the criticism, De Palma said it "was not [his] intention to create a sexual image with the drill, although it could be construed that way." He added, "Women in peril work better in the suspense genre. It all goes back to the
Perils of Pauline...I don't think morality applies to art. It's a ludicrous idea. I mean, what is the morality of a still life? I don't think there's good or bad fruit in the bowl."
Awards and nominations ==Cult reputation and reassessed response==