“I wonder what it’s like to be twins. Do you think they know which one they are?” Sissy Spacek’s Pinky Rose asks her eventual roommate Millie—played by an improvising Shelley Duvall—who fails to take the question for the warning that it is. One of Altman’s most hallucinatory creations, 3 Women was conceived from a dream he had of Duvall and Spacek in the desert, starring in a film about “personality-theft.” Twins and doublings haunt the edges of 3 Women, as Pinky’s infatuation with Millie, a fellow worker at a therapeutic spa for the elderly, takes an obsessive turn. Meanwhile, the “third” woman lurks in the background, expressing herself silently and potently through mythic paintings and mosaics depicting a domineering patriarchy. Ultimately, the triangulated transference of personas reflects a malleability of sense of self which can be by turns sinister and liberatory. In this unpredictable hall of mirrors, Altman’s characteristic multi-track audio soundscaping creates a muffled, almost underwater effect, reflecting the film’s uncanny surreality, rather than the seamless naturalism for which he was known. – Brittany Gravely / Sidney Dritz