Tag: Psychological Horror

Welcome Home

Frank Bowers confronts his imposter

by Moris Farhi

It is less a case of whodunnit than of howtheydunnit in this entertaining paranoia story. Moris Farhi MBE is definitely a renaissance man. Author of several novels, including the multi-award winning Children of the Rainbow, poet, acclaimed writer on Jewish history and philosophy, campaigner for writers imprisoned by oppressive regimes, and jobbing scriptwriter on television series from Return of the Saint to The Onedin Line. His late wife Nina Farhi (nee Gould) was a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and I wonder how much input she had on this story, which involves a psychiatrist abusing his power.

Dr Frank Bowers travels to his new cottage after a long convalescence in hospital following a car accident. To his shock, neither his wife Penny or his friends recognise him, and worse another man is living in his place, who tells him patiently that he is the real Frank Bowers.

This is a much more enjoyable example of the twist followed by twist thriller than Deathday was. There is always a danger with this kind of story that the plot become too contrived and reliant on characters acting very stupidly, but Welcome Home stays just about on the right side of logic. One of its most satisfying revelations is about Bowers’ flashback dreams, which are portrayed through time lapsed photos. We later discover that this is not just a stylistic choice by director Eric Hills, but actually a clue in plain sight as to what is really happening.

Casting Anthony Ainley as Frank Bowers One, as he is named in the credits, is a clever idea because from the start he generates distrust. Later most famous for playing recurring villain The Master in Eighties Doctor Who, Ainley had a flair for the sinister and Frank Bowers initially seems very suspect indeed. When talking to his doctor and then later on the train, his smile is a bit too wide and his bonhomie has touch of mania about it. As he desperately tries to prove his identity, only to be thwarted at every turn, first by circumstance and then by what seems to be a deliberate conspiracy, he does begin to engender sympathy though, and by the end he has become a tragic protagonist.

On the other hand Frank Bowers Two, played by Bernard Brown, first appears as a self-assured, patriarchal personality and pretty much stays like that for the whole story. The only crack in his certainty is when Penny begins to be sympathetic to the other Frank, making him accuse her of being attracted to a younger version who more openly needs her, something he says he hadn’t considered before. Bernard Brown had a long television career of playing lawyers, doctors, officers, and other authority roles. It soon becomes clear that he is the driver behind whatever is happening, but the tension comes from trying to work out what his plan really is.

Special mention should go to Norman Kay’s sinister electronic incidental music, which frequently recalls Doctor Who, another show Kay worked on. In fact thanks to the music, the outdoor filming around a weir rather reminded me of a Jon Pertwee era story.

As with much of the fourth season Welcome Home is more concerned with telling a dramatic story than exploring a concept or issue. It does however touch on the misuse of science and medicine, at a time when psychiatry and other therapies were becoming a popular subject. In shares some DNA with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for example. Although only tangentially science fiction, it carries a warning familiar from many short stories – that people who concentrate too much on a future greater good, and justify immoral actions in the short term, frequently suffer severe consequences – and so do the people around them.

 

 

Deathday

Two men in a lounge

By Angus Hall
Adapted by Brian Hayles

Angus Hall was not impressed with the BBC adaptation of his 1969 novel. Nearly twenty years later during a correspondence in the letters page of the BBC’s cultural magazine The Listener, about the recent BBC2 25th anniversary programming, the author wrote in about the absence of any mention of Out of the Unknown in the celebrations. “I still shudder at how my perfectly respectable ‘psychological thriller’ Deathday was turned into a grotesque ‘other-worldly’ travesty by the programme-makers. I trust that Out of the Unknown remains unknown to all present and future television viewers.” Now I have never read his novel so I cannot directly compare, but I can certainly sympathise with with his disappointment because this was a poor instalment. Hall incidentally wrote over twenty books in the crime and horror genre, amongst them Crime Busters, and Devilday, which was adapted into the cult Vincent Price/ Peter Cushing movie Madhouse.

Adam Crosse is a failure. Stuck in a dead-end reporter job for the local paper. Popping pills. Married to the bitter condescending Lydia. When he discovers his wife has taken a lover and that she does not really care that he knows, his frustrations murderously boil over. Afterwards he begins an elaborate cover-up, trying to cast suspicion onto a current serial killer known in the papers as The Kitchen Killer.

I’ve deliberately kept the synopsis short this time because if I told you much more you could probably guess the ‘twist’ a mile off, just as I did. That is one of the problems with this story. The other is that as a study of a mentally ill murderer, this episode comes off a parody of Dennis Potter as its inadequate middle-aged protagonist.

Actually thinking about it that is one of the problems with the whole ‘psychological thriller’ genre that the Seventies and early Eighties used to love so much – it demonises and trivialises mental health issues. Not to mention providing an excuse for some lazy writing. Whilst the story gives us a few motivations for Crosse’s actions, his wife’s infidelity, his sexual inadequacy, the conflict between his desire to be an alpha man and his essentially passive subservient personality, too often the reason for what happens comes down – he’s a nutter.The other big annoyance I have with the genre ever since Les Diaboliques is that the question – is it real or is the protagonist imagining it? – is actually a pretty boring one that often drains the story of tension rather than creating it.

One later section I had assumed must be happening in his mind, is where Crosse goes driving at night and picks up a sexy blonde woman. Or rather she just jumps into his car at the traffic lights. I thought she might be a prostitute but its soon established she isn’t. Apparently she is just a spirited party girl who does things on a whim and for some reason decides a one night stand with a portly creepy older man would be fun, which stretches credibility to breaking point. In fact it would have only made sense if she was a fantasy but she was real. There is also an unexpected bit of gratuitous nudity as she undresses and explores his bathroom on her own, which felt oddly out of place.

The appalling decor could be a clever reflection of unhappiness in the Crosse and  Gregory households, but I suspect is just a case of hideous BBC Seventies set design. Everything seems so brown. Even the dream sequence looked ugly.

It is another episode where thirty minutes would have been more than enough. Ultimately Crosse is not a particularly interesting murderer and his mental unravelling has no sense of tragedy, since he did have much going for him in the first place. Again this overall tawdriness may be the point of the story, but if you want to see a drama about a hollow man who finds that even murder cannot free him from a modern hell of mediocrity and poor taste, catch American Psycho instead.