The later two films Hassenger is talking about, of course, are Femme Fatale and Passion. However, I would argue that Body Double would surely be the prototypical "palate cleanser" films for De Palma. The 1984 film came on the heels of De Palma's ratings battles with the MPAA, as well as the heatedly negative reception to Scarface - which itself followed the financial failure of what is widely considered to be De Palma's finest film, Blow Out. As such, Body Double is a complete letting-loose, a chance for De Palma to get it all out of his system, wild, funny, and fearless, before getting back to the back-and-forth business of Hollywood compromises.

Here's a bit more from Hassenger:

De Palma had done feature-length dream-logic freakouts before Raising Cain. But what separates Cain from Dressed to Kill or Body Double, besides a number of years spent on non-thrillers for big studios, is how much it feels like a valve being turned on, releasing his pent-up indulgences. Its predecessor, The Bonfire of the Vanities, offers the awkward spectacle of De Palma occasionally applying virtuoso technique to material that’s at once grotesque and defanged—a limping monster of a seriocomic adaptation, where the serious performances don’t fit and the comic notes are held long and loud. Despite his experience working with big stars (The Untouchables), big budgets (Scarface), novel adaptations (Carrie) and dark comedy (take your pick), De Palma feels out of his element in Bonfire. He engineers a thrilling single-take opening scene featuring a drunken Bruce Willis, with screwball timing applied to dirtbag flair, and it barely feels connected to anything else in the movie. Even at its choppiest, in the original theatrical cut, Raising Cain feels all of a piece.

The pattern would repeat, under different circumstances, ten years later with Femme Fatale in 2002, and then ten years after that with Passion in 2012 (not released commercially until 2013, but surely the 2012 New York Film Festival audience that cheered in delight for Passion was as good as it was going to get for that movie). Femme Fatale, which turns 20 this autumn, is best of De Palma’s palate-cleansing trilogy, embracing dream logic to such a degree that it actually tightens the movie up, and enriches De Palma’s obsession with watching others and ourselves, processing events through a camera. (No accident that the opening shot is Rebecca Romijn’s character reflected in a TV screen as she watches Double Indemnity.) Meanwhile, Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars, the De Palma movies that preceded Femme Fatale, only have brilliant passages, fighting against the invisible restraints of big-studio moviemaking.

It’s unlikely that De Palma designed (or De Signed?) these three movies as neatly separated once-a-decade events, but in retrospect it makes them each look like an “erotic thriller” (the designation often applied to De Palma’s thrillers, and even moreso to their imitators) grown progressively more tangled and less recognizable. On paper, Raising Cain looks vaguely in step with other summer 1992 thrillers like Single White Female or Unlawful Entry, where domestic space is violated by an interloper in disguise. Cain is ultimately less reassuring: The threat comes from inside the family, and the disguise becomes literal, with the movie ending on Lithgow popping up from nowhere in drag as one of his character’s alternate personalities. Further down the line, the drift away from sexuality in American cinema is visible when setting Femme Fatale against more popular 2002 thrillers like Panic Room or Enough. (Unfaithful is the exception that proves the rule: A sex-saturated hit that was director Adrian Lyne’s last movie until earlier this year!)

By the time De Palma got to Passion in 2012, this style of movie had fallen so out of fashion that the opening section feels particularly stilted, despite the presence of Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace. Passion is its own hoot, replete with split-screens, knowing references to twins and opportunities for McAdams and Rapace to uncork—and looked positively alien in its day. None of these movies got especially sterling reviews when they were released; all of them look more comfortable next to each other. Cain and Fatale even share a particularly memorable image of a figure materializing behind a character, as well as a pet phrase (“cat’s in the bag”) and the threat of impalement by truck.

Notably, Raising Cain is the only movie in the palate-cleansing trilogy to be followed up by more mainstream triumphs: Next up for De Palma was Carlito’s Way, one of his best movies (by his own estimation, too), and Mission: Impossible, one of his biggest hits. These movies aren’t necessarily better, or, for that matter, less De Palma (Mission: Impossible and Raising Cain both open on surveillance video). But the ability to make a successful and satisfying movie in the studio system can be fleeting in the best of circumstances, and De Palma’s later-period genre workouts really do feel like he’s working something out. Femme Fatale may be the purest expression of De Palma’s sensibility; Raising Cain may be his purest exorcism.