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• Altman built the cast into a hall of mirrors on purpose: the five lead actors swap first names with each other's characters. Susannah York plays Cathryn, Cathryn Harrison plays Susannah, Rene Auberjonois plays Hugh, Hugh Millais plays Marcel, and Marcel Bozzuffi plays Rene, a deliberate identity-scramble baked into the credits.
• Susannah York's character is a children's author, and her narration throughout the film is drawn from York's own real fantasy book 'In Search of Unicorns.' Altman folded her writing into the picture and gave her a co-writing credit for the text, which she later published as a book in 1973.
• York discovered she was pregnant after taking the role and nearly backed out; Altman kept her on, dressed her in loose clothing to hide it, and insisted on keeping one planned nude shot, calling it a deliberate 'Rubenesque' jolt rather than cutting around it.
• The score pairs John Williams with Japanese experimental percussionist Stomu Yamash'ta, who played 'sound sculptures' built by brothers Bernard and Francois Baschet plus shakuhachi flute for the abrasive, unnatural textures. Williams earned an Oscar nomination for it the same year he was also nominated for The Poseidon Adventure.
• Altman had been trying to make the film since the 1960s; it only got financed by the Hemdale Film Group in 1971 and shot that fall (October-December) at Ardmore Studios and on location in County Wicklow, Ireland, with Vilmos Zsigmond behind the camera.
• Susannah York won Best Actress at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival for the role.

The name-swap casting isn't a gimmick, it's the thesis. If actors are wearing each other's names and characters answer to identities that belong to someone else, the film is telling you upfront that Cathryn can't trust which person is which, because the movie itself refuses to keep its people straight. The audience is put inside her confusion structurally, not just shown it.

The apparitions she kills may be projections of her own fractured selves rather than the men around her. The ambiguity of who is actually dead by the end, and the final figure she runs over, supports a reading where every 'killing' is Cathryn attacking a piece of herself, and the body count is internal.

York's own children's book as the narration turns the whole film into a writer's psyche eating itself. The unicorn-and-fairy-tale text she keeps reciting is the safe, ordered world she built on the page, and the hallucinations are that fiction collapsing into the house with her, the imagination she controls professionally turning predatory.

A children's-book author named Cathryn starts hearing a voice that isn't on the phone, then seeing a dead lover who shouldn't be in the room. Altman drops her in an isolated Irish house with her husband and a couple of male visitors, then lets the doubles multiply until she can't tell which body in front of her is real, remembered, or invented. She starts killing the apparitions. The trouble is that apparitions, by definition, don't bleed out on the floor. A camera-puzzle about a woman whose hallucinations have started fighting back.