On its surface, this is an old-fashioned paranoid thriller about a woman who's suddenly afraid to trust anyone, including her nearest and dearest. For window dressing there's a stately country mansion and pre-WWII vintage costumes and cars, plus a top-notch cast of British actors.
But writer-director Stephen Poliakoff is known for off-beat storytelling, and that's not always a good thing. This film is much too unpleasant to serve as an "entertainment" (warning: dead pets!), but has too many lapses in credibility to be taken seriously as a political statement, and way too many plot holes to work as an intellectual puzzler.
There is atmosphere to spare, and some scenes succeed at producing goosebumps...as long as the viewer doesn't actually think about them. Consider the scene where our actress heroine is in a screening room, doing voice-overs, and an actor on the movie screen suddenly breaks character and seems to speak directly to her, from beyond the grave. Goosebumps! But plot-wise, this scene makes no sense at all. Why didn't the actor just speak to her in person when he had the chance? Duh! It's a contrived scene that exists only to produce a transient effect, not to advance the story (or even make sense). There's a lot of this flimflammery in the movie.
The biggest gaff of this sort is the story-within-the-story framing device: how could the two narrators (played by Christopher Lee and Corin Redgrave) possibly know the details of the story that unfolds? One was a child at the time, and the other an infant, and even if they were later told copious intimate details of the goings-on (unlikely), they still could not have known the secret activities and state of mind of our heroine. The frame is there for another reason, so that we won't guess until the final moment that our heroine is still alive; and because the director knows the frame really makes no sense, we never actually hear Lee and Redgrave narrate a word of the story, because at crucial points the viewers would realize that the framing device is nonsensical. This kind of narrative trickery lacks integrity, and it's fatal to a movie with the high moral pretensions of Glorious 39.
This glossy movie is engaging from scene to scene, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
But writer-director Stephen Poliakoff is known for off-beat storytelling, and that's not always a good thing. This film is much too unpleasant to serve as an "entertainment" (warning: dead pets!), but has too many lapses in credibility to be taken seriously as a political statement, and way too many plot holes to work as an intellectual puzzler.
There is atmosphere to spare, and some scenes succeed at producing goosebumps...as long as the viewer doesn't actually think about them. Consider the scene where our actress heroine is in a screening room, doing voice-overs, and an actor on the movie screen suddenly breaks character and seems to speak directly to her, from beyond the grave. Goosebumps! But plot-wise, this scene makes no sense at all. Why didn't the actor just speak to her in person when he had the chance? Duh! It's a contrived scene that exists only to produce a transient effect, not to advance the story (or even make sense). There's a lot of this flimflammery in the movie.
The biggest gaff of this sort is the story-within-the-story framing device: how could the two narrators (played by Christopher Lee and Corin Redgrave) possibly know the details of the story that unfolds? One was a child at the time, and the other an infant, and even if they were later told copious intimate details of the goings-on (unlikely), they still could not have known the secret activities and state of mind of our heroine. The frame is there for another reason, so that we won't guess until the final moment that our heroine is still alive; and because the director knows the frame really makes no sense, we never actually hear Lee and Redgrave narrate a word of the story, because at crucial points the viewers would realize that the framing device is nonsensical. This kind of narrative trickery lacks integrity, and it's fatal to a movie with the high moral pretensions of Glorious 39.
This glossy movie is engaging from scene to scene, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.