Rating: 17/20
Plot: A lady takes a job watching over a pair of siblings and then starts seeing ghosts and believing the children are possessed.
If this movie is more about sex than it is ghosts (and it certainly is), what do you think of all the birds and reptiles? Well, that turtle definitely gets a lot of screen time. The turtle isn't the best example of a reptilian phallic symbol, I guess, unless it is. Those birds are pervasive, adding suspense with amplified fluttering or moving in slow motion near turrets where ghost-men lurk. White flowers (are they roses?) are also omnipresent, the birds and flowers fighting for screen time. Add in all those stalking statues and Deborah Kerr's darkening wardrobe and you've got a lovely forest of symbols for our protagonist to maneuver through.
Now that I think of it, isn't the first thing that Flora (ahem) says when she meets her new governess a question about whether she's scared of reptiles? The turtle might not be much of a phallic symbol, unless it is, but that maid didn't seem to know the difference between one and a frog. I'm onto something here, but I'm not sure what it is.
The real creepiness in this sorta-horror movie is in its ambiguity. You wonder about the importance of this uncle character, for example. I mean, he's almost comically dickish, admitting with no hesitation that he wants nothing at all to do with these children, children who could probably be seen as symbols themselves. Kerr is clearly projecting once she's at the sprawling property, but is the uncle a stand-in for a spurning ex-love, an absent father, a chastising priest? Is he the catalyst for the mental deterioration of our protagonist? More ambiguity--do the ghosts actually exist at all or are they figments? Do the children even exist? Who exactly is an "innocent" in this movie? What does that maid know? What does that turtle know? Is that beetle escaping the mouth of that statue or was it just being sexually adventurous? If the children do actually exist, are they really possessed or is that all in Kerr's character's mind?
I mean, I often jump to conclusions about the possible possession of children myself, but it's odd how quickly she reaches that hypothesis, isn't it? See a ghost, decide that the kids are acting a little strange (possession, I realized, is pretty close to entitlement), decide that they must be possessed? As a narrative, Miss Giddens' experiences don't really hold up, and seeing this story unfold from her perspective makes the whole thing a little unreliable, adding to that ambiguity and, as a result, the creepiness.
I loved how this thing was shot. The lighting is so good, and there are always so many layers to every shot. I can see somebody arguing that filming in this kind of location with the water and those flowers and the statues and the curves of that mansion would be easy to make beautiful, but I think there are some special things being done with the cinematography here. I love all the shots with a character in profile in close-up with another character or something else in the background and then the more impressionistic splotches of foliage or mansion walls behind that. Lovely, lovely stuff.
I have to talk about the sound, too. The sound effects are often exaggerated--those birds!--and the screams in this are especially screamy. This is most effective when the sound effects are more subtle, and it's even more effective when it's sans music. The score was awfully jaunty at times. I do love how the voices echo during certain scenes in the house.
If there's one thing that personally scares me more than anything else, it's seeing figures approach windows. Screw you, Peter Quint.
Maybe it's the turtle's shell that's supposed to be important. Oh, there's just so much to unpack in this one! I think I loved it.
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