Middle-aged spinster Maura (Patricia Neal), the adopted daughter of wealthy widow Edith Prince (Pamela Brown), isn't too happy when her mother appoints drifter Billy Jarvis (Nicholas Clay) as their handyman. However, as the days pass, and Billy sets about fixing up the house and clearing the garden, Maura begins to form an attachment to Billy. What she doesn't know is that the young man is actually a serial killer, who abducts and murders women, burying their bodies in building sites.
Both a tragic love story and a psycho-sexual thriller (in flashbacks, it is shown that Billy was sexually molested as a child and has problems being intimate with women), The Night Digger is, for the most part, a mood piece, the film set predominantly in and around the rundown Prince house, with Billy's murderous nature remaining undisclosed for the first 45 minutes or so. Director Alastair Reid fleshes out his characters and builds an unsettling atmosphere (there are bizarre conversations about sex-ops, and Maura's relationship with her mother is awkward), and the pace can only be described as 'slow-burn', all of which makes the first moment we see Billy in psycho mode all the more disturbing: creeping into a nursery teacher's bedroom, he takes off all of his clothes, unfurls a large leather strap and places it around the sleeping woman, who wakes to find herself bound to her bed and faced with the naked intruder. It's a bizarre, unexpectedly twisted moment that doesn't end well for the teacher.
Reports of the teacher's disappearance are in the following day's news, and it is revealed that she is the seventh woman to fall prey to 'the night digger' in the past three months, previous victims being from the very same towns and cities that Billy said he worked at prior to arriving at the Prince property. Victim number eight is Edith's young district nurse (played by Brigit Forsyth of The Likely Lads fame), who Billy kills while Maura is visiting her mother in hospital following a heart attack. When Maura returns home ('home' being regular Hammer horror location Oakley Court), Billy tries to confess to Maura, but is unable to go through with it. The cogs in Maura's mind are set turning, nevertheless.
When Edith suddenly announces that she wants Billy to leave, Maura tells her 'mother' that she has had enough and is packing her bags as well. Maura gets herself a nasty hair-do, empties her bank account, tells Billy that she loves him, and suggests that they buy a cottage in a remote part of Scotland, away from other people; it would seem as though she knows his secret, and is trying to help by removing temptation from his path. Things aren't that simple, though, and it's not long before Billy is eyeing up a pretty Scottish lass as victim number nine.
With a director unafraid to tackle bold subjects (Reid also gave us Baby Love, the UK's answer to Lolita), a great leading lady, a script by none other than Roald Dahl (Neal's husband at the time), and music by Bernard Herrmann (the score will sound very familiar in places), The Night Digger already has quite the pedigree, but it also benefits from solid turns from a decent supporting cast (Graham Crowden, as salacious neighbour Mr Bolton, is a hoot, and there are brief but fun roles for familiar UK TV faces Yootha Joyce and Peter Sallis), brooding tension, and a memorably downbeat ending that doesn't spell everything out for the viewer but which makes them assess what they have seen and draw their own conclusion.
