SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON

This is probably Bryan Forbes' best film. It's an extremely taut, bleak and downbeat piece of work, the kind of thriller that truly merits the adjective 'clammy'. It is set in one of those London suburbs you really wouldn't want to live in, certainly not with a neighbour like Kim Stanley's demented medium who hatches a plot, (her weak-willed husband, played by Richard Attenborough, forces himself to go along with it), to kidnap a child then reveal the child's whereabouts to the police so she can achieve a kind of fame. But you know instantly that the woman is dangerously unstable and things can only go from very bad to much worse. Both Stanley, (much underused, at least so far as the cinema was concerned), and Attenborough give terrific performances and Forbes handles the unsettling material, (from a novel by Mark McShane), with considerable brio.