Gaslight

A British thriller set in Victorian London. A woman was strangled in a house on a square years ago and the killer was never found. The house has stood empty since. Now a couple move in. The husband is charming in company and something else at home. Small things start going missing. A brooch, a picture from the wall, a receipt. Each time he finds them in her bag or her drawer, and each time he tells her, gently, that she does not remember doing it. She hears footsteps above the sealed upper floor. In the evenings the gas lights dim and brighten and he tells her she is imagining it. From there the film is not a mystery for the audience. We know almost from the start what he is doing; the tension is whether anyone outside the house will notice. Someone does. A retired policeman recognises the address and starts asking about the old case. What the narrative is interested in is not murder but method: the film shows step by step how a person is made to distrust their own senses, and the word for it in English comes from this story. The source is a stage play by Patrick Hamilton, and the film keeps its shape; almost everything happens in one house. Anton Walbrook plays the husband and Diana Wynyard the wife. Thorold Dickinson directed. The film has a hard history. When an American studio bought the rights to remake it a few years later, it sought to have the prints of this version destroyed so it would not compete. Copies survived and the film was recovered later. Who it is for: anyone who wants the original of a story most people know through the remake. Who it is not for: anyone expecting twists; the audience is ahead of the plot the whole way, deliberately.