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| Released: |
1973 |
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| Genre: |
HORROR
THRILLER
CONTROVERSIAL
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| Origin: |
GB/ Italy |
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| Length: |
110 |
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ANTI Reviews
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| Full of grandly vacuous statements about life, death, love, art, religion, and whatnot (especially whatnot). There was... enough artsy crosscutting (particularly in the big sex scene) and flashing backward and forward to have Roeg arrested as a flasher. The shoddy underlying material, blown up, dragged out, worried to would-be metaphysical significance, became merely ludicrous, and, ipso facto, the delight of specialists in false profundity. |
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| (John Simon, National Review) |
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| The genre can do without filmmakers who value intellectual process over dramatic reality - particularly when the intellectual process leads the viewer to confuse superficial emptiness with the transcendental kind. |
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| (Cinefantastique) |
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| Story is amazingly simple, but it comes across as perplexing because of Roeg’s stylistic impositions. He uses bizarre angles, constantly cuts back and forth between present, past, and future, and stages conversations in which everyone seems out of sync with everyone else. All characters, including Sutherland and Christie, seem disoriented—what are they thinking? The battle between conventional religion and the occult doesn’t matter much as far as Sutherland or Christie is concerned (only the priest seems shaken); in fact, I can’t really figure out why it matters if the sister or Sutherland has extrasensory powers or if the daughter is sending warnings from the grave - certainly Sutherland would chase any small figuree in a hooded red outfit (his daughter wore a red housecoat), regardless of what he’d been warned. All the occult stuff is creepy, yet it really doesn’t tie together very well. |
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| (Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic, 1986) |
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. Julie Christie 