Faces in the Dark

Based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the French authors whose fiction was adapted by Hitchcock for Vertigo (1958) and Clouzot for Diabolique (1955), David Eady’s Faces in the Dark can’t compare to those two masterpieces but it manages to conjure the same kind of tension, ambiguity, and doom; in fact, unlike the two earlier films, even the ending doesn’t bring a clear explanation of the mysteries raised throughout. Suffering a permanent loss of sight from a laboratory accident, Richard Hammond (John Gregson) takes us along on his mental breakdown upon his return home (after six months in the hospital) to his wife Christiane (Mai Zetterling) at their country home where Richard’s brother Max (John Ireland) and business partner David (Michael Denison) will help take care of him. As Richard’s remaining four senses detect oddities in the house (the peal of a strange church bell, the scent of unfamiliar pine trees), he succumbs to paranoia, which turns to horror once he’s told Max has suddenly died. Zetterling is excellent as the inscrutable wife, who could just as easily be a psychopath as a saint, while Hodges’ occasionally disorienting camera and Theodorakis’ eerie, theremin-tinged score help create the unsettling, claustrophobic atmosphere in the house from which Richard desperately escapes into the blindness of the night.