In the 1970s this modest entry would have been a 60-minute TV episode from an anthology such as Brian Clemens's "Thriller" or "Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense". To make it feature-length, too many false endings have been tacked on; but the substance is just about intriguing enough to keep a late-night television viewer (if not, apparently, a British distributor) watching to the positively final climax.
A girls' boarding school at half term affords plenty of shots of the heroine, Sophia Myles, creeping along deserted corridors and entering empty rooms, or being walked in on by a trio of sinister older women. Miss Myles, very much in the buxom English rose mould of Kate Winslet, acquits herself competently without lurching into the irritating extremes of scream queen on the one hand or dopey wide-eyed dupe on the other: she projects intelligence as well as courage.
Sophie Ward as her steely headmistress and Celia Imrie-- in a role as an art-dealing doctor which is outside her normal persona as a glamorous but trustworthy Scotch matron-- keep audiences guessing about their motives. The men are not as satisfactory. Sophia's object of adulterous affection, an American art teacher married to Ms Ward, is less a character than a McGuffin. Michael Elphick, sadly bloated in his last big-screen appearance, has little to do.
The soundtrack is too replete with creepy music: the natural sounds of a big old building in the depths of the English countryside could have been used more. There are a few wince-making genre clichés, such as Sophia flinching when a sheet is pulled back and she has to ID a disfigured corpse. But this is a British suspenser which keeps its language clean, aims above the gut and avoids mid-Atlanticism. It deserved better than a late-night BBC1 premiere without even a write-up in the 'Radio Times'; if the BBC had produced it as a TV movie, they would have talked it up.
