The atmosphere is stark and impressive, helped all the more by an unusual but amazing Henry Mancini score. It's filmed on location in Denmark and Sweden, in some mightily forbidding looking country you can practically feel the cold while you watch. It overcomes a rather trite story set up to deliver an incredibly engaging yarn it's what director Laslo Benedek ('The Wild One') and company do with the material that matters.

This is more of a straightforward thriller. Slasher fans might hear of this one and get their hopes up, due to the violence suggested in certain scenes, but we never see any actual killings. An inspector played by the always solid Trevor Howard must solve these baffling crimes. However, because he is able to actually return to his cell in time, suspicion falls upon his brother in law, Anton (Per Oscarsson), instead. As the movie opens, he has successfully pulled off an escape, and he wreaks vengeance upon his hapless family. Max von Sydow plays Salem, wrongly convicted of a murder and sent to stay in an asylum for the criminally insane. THE NIGHT VISITOR certainly isn't for all tastes, but it's an odd film indeed: quiet and yet spellbinding at the same time. Aside from the Swedish luminaries, we get a real old timer as the detective (Trevor Howard) alongside popular Swedish actor Per Oscarsson, and supporting roles for two Hammer star Brits, Rupert Davies and Andrew Keir.

The film is also notable for an exemplary cast. I liked it there's style to spare, and some ingenious situations as we see Von Sydow's character putting the impossible into action. The film's chilly, snowbound northern setting (Jutland) is as much a character as the cast themselves, and the story certainly has a unique feel to it: slow, stately, very much like an art-house film, but with dark revenge/thriller plotting. It's quite a vicious film even though the on-screen violence is limited and the viewer never sees much of what's actually taking place.

This obscure USA/Sweden co-production brings together two of Bergman's favourite actors (Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman) in a tale of madness, desperation, revenge, and sinister murder. I guess that if Ingmar Bergman had ever made an out-and-out horror film, THE NIGHT VISITOR is what it would have looked like.

The visitor ray bradbury