The Amazing Mr Blunden

A fine adaptation of Antonia Barber's novel The Ghosts, which begins with a quiet nostalgia reminiscent of Jeffries' earlier The Railway Children: a cosy suburban house, a death, and then the miraculous translation of a widowed mother and her children to a cottage in the country. The translator is a friendly ghost (Naismith), and in the crumbling old mansion where their mother is now caretaker, James and Lucy are drawn into a strange adventure where they find themselves going back 100 years to save another brother and sister from being hounded to death for their money. Handled with that sense of enchanted stillness which is one of Jeffries' great gifts as a director, the apparitions, the apprehensions, and the atmosphere of brooding menace about the house are exquisitely done.