Nelly's Version

An amnesiac with a suitcase full of cash checks in at a Home Counties hotel. A Michael Nyman score propels her wanderings with edgy B movie insistence. Her wake becomes littered with cross-purpose conversations, crime, accidents and arson. Is she an escapee or an escapist? A conspirator or a conspiracy victim? Is she Nelly Dean (who, remember, used to sit and dream) or is she really this Eleanor Wilkinson whom strangers claim as friend, mother and wife? Is Nelly's Version a feminist thriller, or a fiction about fiction? It's a mystery, certainly, and a damn good one; inventively playful in the filmic ambiguities piled on those of Eva Figes' novel by director Maurice Hatton. And all, of course, to be taken as seriously as the Freudianism of Hitchcock's Spellbound, which strays on screen here amid umpteen wryly allusive nods to the cinéma d'auteur. As the railway porter helpfully explains, apropos of plot, psychology or maybe just trains, it's all a matter of connections.