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Séance on a Wet Afternoon

Séance on a Wet Afternoon

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Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Black & White
  • Widescreen


Description:

Aside from boasting one of the great evocative titles in film history, Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) works up a surplus of dread with a minimum of devices. Kim Stanley was nominated for an Oscar® for her performance as a London medium who bulldozes her weak husband (Richard Attenborough) into kidnapping a little girl; the goal is not ransom money, but a chance to prove Stanley's clairvoyant gifts to the police, and thus bring her the respect she has always deserved. The suspense is keen, yet the movie's real achievement is detailing the stifling marriage between two deluded, dependent middle-aged people. Attenborough is heartbreaking as a human doormat, and Stanley's Method intensity brings the movie into a genuinely unnerving realm (she didn't work in movies again for nearly two decades). The story was remade, with intriguing changes, by Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa as Séance (a.k.a. Korei, 2000). --Robert Horton
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