Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) - film review

Myra Savage is a professional medium who holds regular seances at her dank Victorian home in London.  Her submissive husband, Billy, is unable to find work owing to his asthma, so the couple are dependent on Myra’s meagre earnings from her seances.   Convinced that she genuinely does have psychic abilities, Myra conceives a plan that will bring her fame and fortune.  She instructs Billy to abduct the young daughter of a wealthy industrialist and bring her to the house, where she will be locked up in a room that has been decorated as a hospital bedroom.  After the girl’s parents have paid the ransom, Myra will hold a seance at which she will reveal the whereabouts of the missing girl.  Billy is convinced the scheme will fail but has no choice but to play along.  He soon realises that his wife has totally lost her grip on reality and fears where this adventure may end...

The most impressive of the production collaborations of Bryan Forbes and Richard Attenborough, Seance on a Wet Afternoon is a darkly affectionate portrait of insanity and marital devotion that is as poignant as it is unsettling.  The dreary, confined setting of the old Victorian house within which most of the story takes place is a potent expression of the bleakly oppressive, Pinteresque relationship of the two deeply flawed yet believable protagonists. The latter are bound to one another by a mutual dependency that each resents and tries to fight against, in vain.  Often classed as a psychological thriller, this is in fact an intensely compelling character piece about two individuals who are struggling desperately to escape from the mire of mediocrity into which fate has thrown them.

Much darker in tone than Forbes’s previous two (equally impressive) films, Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and The L-Shaped Room (1962), Seance on a Wet Afternoon offers a quintessentially British depiction of mental derangement.  At the outset, it is possible to mistake the heroine’s strange behaviour for eccentricity; indeed, it is her husband who is the more sinister of the two.  But it soon becomes clear where the power balance lies in the strained husband-wife relationship and who has purchased a one-way ticket for the funny farm.  Billy’s apparent inability to stand up to his wife as their well-planned scheme spirals out of control would be laughable if the characters were not played so convincingly by the leads, Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough.

Bryan Forbes had particular difficulty casting the part of Myra Savage.  Various distinguished actresses were considered for the part – including Margaret Lockwood, Deborah Kerr and Simone Signoret - but none was available or interested in the film.  Finally, Forbes cast the acclaimed American stage actress Kim Stanley (who had only appeared in one film prior to this) and she proved to be perfect for the role of Myra.  Richard Attenborough was an obvious casting choice for the part of Myra’s husband and gives what is easily one of his best screen performances, skilfully portraying a man who is visibly torn between the dictats of his conscience and his duty towards his wife.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon offers the most harrowing dissection of a marriage that refuses to whither and die in spite of the burgeoning tensions between the two partners, surpassed only by Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973).  This is a kind of love story, but one that is darkly ironic and savagely undercut by unintentional sadism and cruelty as madness begins to take over.  Romantic love is a kind of insanity and this is perhaps what makes it so hard for Attenborough’s character to extricate himself from the power that his wife exerts over him and see her for what she truly is, a mad and dangerous woman.   The peculiarities of married life is something that Bryan Forbes would revisit time and again in his subsequent films, with just as much insight and originality, perhaps the best example being his underrated horror classic The Stepford Wives (1975).

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