Film

The Red House (1947)

Director: Delmer Daves

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

If you go down to the woods today, you're bound for a big surprise: you won't find a picnic, however, but necrophilia, madness, incestuous longings, tyrannical possessiveness, and murder. Impossible to give an effective synopsis of the incredibly heavy plotting; but basically, when one-legged farmer Robinson's adopted daughter brings home a potential boyfriend, all manner of mysteries, scandals and sinister goings-on are let loose as Robinson resorts to violence to keep the young ones away from his nasty secret down in the nearby forest. Warped relationships are the norm in his weird but hardly wonderful world, and indeed even the film itself boasts a perverse pedigree: it's a pastoral, noir-inflected psychodrama with supernatural overtones, dealing chiefly with the thin line between healthy and sick sexuality. All very Freudian, in fact, and often very frightening, with Robinson in superb form as the patriarch tormented by his past.

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