John Gregson plays a very unsympathetic character, a genius inventor at a firm for making bulbs, and he makes a breakthrough with a new revolutionary invention, but the laboratory explodes, and he loses his sight. Fortunately he is married to the always lovely but ambiguous Mai Zetterling, who takes well care of him with his main partner at the job by her side, but there is also John Ireland as his brother, a good-for-nothing always needing money, drinking and playing the piano and with a bad heart at that, for running too much after women. That's the set-up.
It's a cruel drama, almost nasty in character, Boileau-Narcejac are not quite convincing this time in their contrived intriguing but overdo it, while the main theme is the more interesting: a blind man finding himself not only groping in the darkness but finding that darkness growing ever thicker as his closest of kin are more and more lost to him. It starts on a very small level, he fails to recognize his cat, he finds himself smelling trees that weren't there, and he is not helped at all by his own very aggressive nature losing patience all the time. It's a story about darkness and loneliness that constantly grows worse, and the end isn't exactly any answer to his predicament.
The acting is perfect, the psychological realism is consistent, but there are flaws in the concrete story, just as in their other unsurprassed thrillers, like "Vertigo" and "Les diaboliques."
It's a cruel drama, almost nasty in character, Boileau-Narcejac are not quite convincing this time in their contrived intriguing but overdo it, while the main theme is the more interesting: a blind man finding himself not only groping in the darkness but finding that darkness growing ever thicker as his closest of kin are more and more lost to him. It starts on a very small level, he fails to recognize his cat, he finds himself smelling trees that weren't there, and he is not helped at all by his own very aggressive nature losing patience all the time. It's a story about darkness and loneliness that constantly grows worse, and the end isn't exactly any answer to his predicament.
The acting is perfect, the psychological realism is consistent, but there are flaws in the concrete story, just as in their other unsurprassed thrillers, like "Vertigo" and "Les diaboliques."