Vicki

In postwar Los Angeles, small-time model Vicki Lynn is found dead in her apartment, and the case falls to Lt. Ed Cornell, a detective whose obsession with the victim quickly exceeds professional interest. Vicki's older sister Jill, now working a respectable job and engaged to a steady man, is drawn back into the investigation – first as a witness, then as a suspect. Cornell, relentless and increasingly erratic, fixes his suspicion on Steve Christopher, a press agent who had been managing Vicki's climb toward stardom.

The inquiry moves through a network of men who wanted something from Vicki – a nightclub owner, a foreign-born socialite, a tabloid photographer – and none of them accounts cleanly for his time. Cornell's interrogations grow less like police work and more like a private reckoning, exposing the detective's own complicated feelings for a woman he may have loved and cannot let go. Jill watches this unfold and begins to doubt whether Cornell is pursuing justice or something darker, while Steve, squeezed from every direction, struggles to protect himself without understanding what he is being protected against.

Vicki is a remake of I Wake Up Screaming (1941), and it wears that lineage openly – the flashback structure, the detective's pathological grief, the girl who exists mostly as an absence around which men arrange their guilt. Where the 1941 version leaned into theatrical expressionism, Horner's film pushes toward a grittier procedural register, trading atmospheric shadow for fluorescent interrogation rooms and crowded press offices. The film belongs to the strand of early-fifties noir that treats the machinery of celebrity and the machinery of justice as equally indifferent to the truth.