Out of Bounds

Sophie Ward is excellent as the headmistress of a girl's school, who has to face sore trials in her relationships, with her husband, an American painter and teacher of art, and her favourite pupil Sophie Myles, who becomes his mistress in the very school premises, which of course must lead to complications. They both act rather foolishly, how careless and irresponsible can you get as a teacher in a girl's school, while the headmistress Sophie Ward at least tries to keep control, maintaining style and appearances. The story does not quite hold out until the end, there are some improbable flaws, while the interesting part is Sophie Myles' occult revelations of her lover when he is gone and believed dead or even killed. What kills the plot is the doctor's loss of control, who does some things a doctor never should or could do, while at first she appears as the most self-controlled person of all. The acting is good throughout, there are some interesting Gothic elements, as it could develop into a truly scary business, which it actually tries to do, but too many things go wrong, and in the end when a corpse is fished out of the pond it only adds to the general confusion, while we shall never know how all this mess really ended. We are left with some puzzling guesses, while our sympathies remain with the headmistress.

The headmistress of an all-girl boarding school discovers her art-teacher husband is having an affair with a pupil. The husband disappears leaving his wife and the girl alone in the rambling old-school buildings during a school break.On paper this sounds like a good premise for a creepy thriller. In reality what we get is a series of unlikely killings, red-herrings a-plenty and an uneven tone that never pulls the viewer in to the story.

The biggest problem is the timid, anaemic direction for which writer Merlin Ward himself must take the blame. This is clearly a case of failing to identify the target audience. Is this an afternoon TV movie or a late-night thriller? In trying to hedge his bets Ward misses both targets. Clearly frightened of "Lolita" comparisons, he has Sophia Myles portray the schoolgirl at the heart of the story as the blandest of blondes. In similar vain, he makes only the merest of hints as to why headmistress Veronica Van Huet (an otherwise excellent performance by Sophie Ward) would not have had the girl expelled immediately.

The ending piles on the unlikely events thick and fast but fails to provide a satisfying explanation for them.

In truth it's probably not as bad as I've made it sound, but it is unsatisfying to see a missed opportunity to make a better movie. If only the Coen Brothers had been in charge this could have been a first-rate black comedy.

The writer apparently had 10 endings for his movie . . . So what did he do? He used all 10! One after another, after another, after another. Ad Nauseam! By the time I watched every ending I was so exhausted I didn't care who lived or died or how it really ended. Shame on you Merlin Ward!

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.

This was well acted especially by the two female leads. However, the twists were overdone...especially Celia Imrie as a Psycho. She being a doctor how come she did not know Mr Van Huet was properly dead!?

Other characters, Sophie ward's first husband and his second wife didn't instill belief, when all others did.

Also, Mr Van Huet also became a sudden Psycho, killing Michael Elphick(not wholly sure why, was Mr Elphick in on his "death") and, so the viewer, may believe at the end going to kill Sophie Myles.

If it had not gone slightly over the top and crappy other characters, it could have been a really eerie/mystery film in the old Gothic style.

It's a shame to the male world that Sophie Ward is a lesbian.

But Overall enjoyable.