Daughter of Darkness

It’s tough to describe Lance Comfort’s mysterious, mesmerizing Daughter of Darkness: a psychosexual noir thriller, a Christian allegory, a masterwork of surrealism, a social commentary, a macabre horror film, or maybe all of the above. Despite her devout faith and service to the local Catholic church, the orphaned Irish teen-ager Emmy Baudine (Siobhan McKenna) is despised by all the women in town (“Don’t you touch my child, you brazen slut”). When they order the priest to eject her from the parish, he reluctantly sends her away to England to work on a friend’s farm, where she quickly attracts all the boys while repulsing the womenfolk (again). When young men start dropping dead in and around the farm, Emmy naturally becomes the prime suspect. Whether Emmy is a psychopathic killer, a split personality, a victim of serial rape, or simply a symbol of unholiness is never explained, but her presence clearly stirs up omens of doom (threatening church organ music, a dog’s moonlit howling on a hill). Maxwell Reed plays a carnival worker who won’t take “No” for an answer and Anne Crawford plays a shrewd local woman committed to unearthing the truth about Emmy. McKenna is sensational as the disturbed “harlot,” often appearing ghost-like and talking to herself, and the low-key, B&W lighting — mostly nighttime, mostly outdoors — creates plenty of  expressionistic wonder.