The Innocents

This one was slow going for awhile, but in the end I just had to admire its creepiness and much of its sinister ambiance and attention to detail. It's a British film based on the 1898 American novella "The Turn of the Screw", about a young woman (Deborah Kerr) who accepts a job as governess for two small children somewhere off in the English countryside. Neglected by their distant uncle (Michael Redgrave), little orphans Miles and Flora are of special interest to Miss Giddens (Kerr), as she adores children and cares about their well being. But very soon she begins hearing voices and seeing vivid apparitions of the deceased former governess and her dead lover, an evil valet who used to work on the Estate. Are they ghosts? Have the two children become possessed and corrupted by the spirits of the dead? Deborah Kerr's paranoid performance is very good here, and I appreciated the ambiguous nature of the proceedings; not everything is spelled out, and much is left to the viewer's imagination, including the ending -- which is not completely resolved, but is very powerful. *** out of ****