The Night Visitor

Salem (Max von Sydow) was found guilty of murder two years ago and was sentenced to an asylum for the criminally insane. However, Salem was innocent...and now he's very angry. How angry? Angry enough to figure a complicated way to escape, pay back those who have wronged him and then return unnoticed to his cell.

The pacing of this one is slow and an editing might have helped. On the other hand, the story idea is great. The escape is very complex and believable....and you get to see it from start to finish. And, finally, it ends very well. Overall, a great little thriller well worth your time simply because it was written so very well.

Atmospherically set in freezing Jutland, this clever revenge drama starts slowly but will grab your interest as Salem's plan unfolds. The acting is good and the film is well-handled by director Laslo Benedek. Worth a viewing.

This film opens up with Max von Sydow running across snowy fields in his underpants. Good lord, we wonder, what's he doing out there? Isn't he freezing? Soon he cleverly figures out a way to get into a house via an upstairs window, and it becomes apparent that he knows the three people who are engaged in a disagreement in the kitchen below. We're not sure what he's up to, and as it's best you don't know a lot about the plot before watching this one, I won't say more.

The story is taut and well-told by director László Benedek, who wisely avoids extraneous detail, and there are moments of real tension. It's dark, but Benedek exercises restraint, which I liked, but which may turn off viewers seeking more explicit thrills. Trevor Howard, who you may recognize from Brief Encounter (1945) and The Third Man (1949), is strong as a detective, and the rest of the cast are all good as well. I liked the way we eventually see how von Sydow is able to do what he does, though you'll have to suspend disbelief a bit. Clever ending too.

A man is running away from a large brick building surrounded by a high wall. He's running across rocks and snow in his underwear and boots. He sneaks into a farmhouse and steals some odd items, and sneaks into another house where he kills a woman. It's not the last person he'll kill either; he's trying to frame someone, but why - and how is he getting away from the place that establishes his alibi?

This is a very good movie. As a horror movie, it doesn't have a very high body count, or much gore, and there's no on screen violence - it cuts away from that. Some horror movies benefit from that, some don't; this one doesn't need it. The locations: isolated locations surrounded by snowy fields are very nice to look at. Acting is very good, as is the musical score by Mancini.

Definitely deserves to be better-known. I'm surprised some critics didn't like it. Some didn't like that the movie gives some things away early on that could have been withheld. I don't agree; not every movie that has secrets needs to save them for a big reveal at the end. Others felt that the characters' motivations weren't established. I can only suppose they weren't listening to the dialog, because that was fully discussed.

I saw this for the first time recently after reading Coventry's review. If not for Coventry's review, i wudnt have stumbled upon this atmospheric n fascinating film.

Salem (Max von Sydow), a mental asylum inmate escapes from the asylum in the dead of winter n reaches his family farm, now run by his younger sisters n the husband of the elder sis. Salem kills all the people he believes responsible for his unfair conviction and subsequent confinement. The film has oodles of atmosphere, the frozen locations, the sparsely populated area n the freezing n gushing wind. Salem's escape plan is meticulously shown and viewers will root for his character.

I think Law Abiding Citizen (one of my fav revenge thriller) borrowed from this film.





Some may wonder why Salem killed Brit Torrens. Salem's alibi in the case was Brit Torens, a young lover he was with when the farmhand was killed. Unfortunately, Brit did not speak up in court to clear Salem, instead protecting her own virginal reputation at the cost of his freedom.