Starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren. Rated PG. Opens Friday, November 30, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

Hitchcock comes close on the heels of a blandly titled HBO movie that gave parallel treatment to the Master of Suspense. The Girl starred a padded Toby Jones as the famed English director obsessing over new discovery Tippi Hedren while working on The Birds, with Imelda Staunton as his hard-to-read wife and creative partner, Alma.

This thinly written star vehicle has a puffed-out Anthony Hopkins as our pal Alfie. Although loosely based on a nonfiction book called Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, the new film’s screenplay, by John McLaughlin (Black Swan), shows more interest in weak psychodrama than in the drama of making Psycho.

Helen Mirren plays Hitch’s mate and is thus a much more potent force than the helpmate whom we know looked the other way through countless infatuations. This Alma has a distraction of her own, one Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), who worked on Hitch’s classic Strangers on a Train and then moved to TV purgatory. Is he after Alma for her body, her mind, or her connections? Well, he does get her out of the way while the director wrangles on-set with ex-paramour Vera Miles, played by sharp-featured Jessica Biel, who might have been a better Janet Leigh than softy Scarlett Johansson proves to be. James D’Arcy is convincing as Anthony Perkins, but the film just wants us to snigger at his sexuality.

Hopkins is effective, overall, especially in some tense scenes with Mirren, but it’s easy to lose sight of what the story is about, and director Sacha Gervasi gives away far too much valuable screen time to Hitch’s alleged fascination with late-’50s killer ghoul Ed Gein. Played by Michael Wincott, this sadistic muse shows up as often as Margaret Thatcher’s dead husband in The Iron Lady, with similarly mummifying results.

Watch the trailer for Hitchcock.