This is the scene where we play Who’s that chambermaid?
Gaslight (1944) is what might be called a sneaky, artless story, wandering about at random as an insistent sense of malevolence overtakes the audience, until an abrupt exponential sense of anxiety impinges on their otherwise amiable sense of placid activities. The young Paula Alquist is bereft of family, the last of it, her world-famous opera singer Aunt Alice, murdered by an unknown assailant in her townhouse, her sad body found in the flickering gaslight of 1800s London.
But Paula doesn’t live there any more. She lives in Europe, where ten or more years later, Paula meets an attractive stranger. A whirlwind romance follows, and marriage, and then the newly minted husband mentions a new destination, a home, where he knows of an empty townhouse.
Paula agrees, albeit reluctantly.
Once there, her husband, a composer, withdraws nightly to a separate residence to work on his music. This does not leave the days open for exploring London or exchanging visits, though, because Paula is exhibiting symptoms of mental illness: noises from the closed-off uppermost floor that only she can hear, events and appointments forgotten, a most unattractive worry that she’s taking leave of her senses.
And a husband with a volcanic temper.
But the plot really tightens up when a policeman, seeing in Paula her Aunt Alice, takes an interest – especially as the murder of Alice remains unresolved. Apple carts are upset, tempers dislodged, and eventually all is revealed, with the husband tied up, begging his wife to release him so that he may flee the nefarious powers that pursue him.
But she has a knife, and a murderous lust in her eyes. Much like the plot itself, there are unseen currents buffeting her reason, and the tricky riptides caused by mendacity are swirling about in vicious anticipation of yet another victim. But who will mendacity claim and carry away this time?
There is deception everywhere, from pacing to personality, and, at first, it’s so well done as to leave the audience wondering why they are watching. But the little glitches begin to accumulate, and by the end the seat of their chairs are all that’s left of the audience’s contact with reality.
Recommended.
