Dead of Night

An architect is invited to a house he has never seen and announces, on walking in, that he knows everyone there from a recurring dream. The guests take turns telling their own uncanny stories: a driver warned of death at a racetrack, a child who meets something during hide and seek, a mirror that pulls a man into another room. Four directors split the Ealing production, and the last segment, the ventriloquist and his dummy, is what the film is remembered for. Michael Redgrave plays a man who starts to believe his own dummy, and the performance is frightening and pitiable at once. The real trick is structural. The film returns to where it began and never ends. That loop left a mark on cosmology: Thomas Gold, Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi asked what a universe like that would mean and arrived at the steady state model. The golfing comedy episode drops the temperature badly. Who it is for: anyone curious about classic British horror. Who it is not for: viewers who need momentum.