IN FRAME: ‘Séance on a Wet Afternoon’: A creepy British thriller to get you in the mood for spooky season

I had the displeasure of watching 98% of “Venom: the Last Dance” with Peter and a friend of his last week.

I came home from work when they were about 15 minutes into the film, which is important to note because, even though I saw most of the movie, I cannot tell you one single thing about it.

Other than maybe how many times I screamed in my head, “Juno Temple, girl, you deserve so much better than this!”

I thought about writing this column on “Venom: the Last Dance,” but as I said, I don’t have very much to say about it. And besides, I wanted to write about something I liked instead of agonizing over something that is too forgettable to even hate.

So, I did what I do best: I searched the various streaming channels I begrudgingly pay for and eventually stumbled upon a British thriller from 1964 called “Séance on a Wet Afternoon.”

The title pretty much had me hooked, and reading the summary intrigued me even more.

The film, based on the 1961 novel of the same name by Mark McShane, follows Myra Savage (Kim Stanley), a self-professed medium who hatches an insane plan to get more recognition for her skills by kidnapping a child and then using her so-called psychic abilities to help find her.

She enlists the help of her quiet, pushover husband, Billy (Richard Attenborough), to accomplish this absurd feat. But as Myra’s mental instability worsens, she begins plotting something far worse than a kidnapping, something her husband knows they will never come back from.

While this film is more of a psychological thriller than a paranormal one, it is such a creepy, atmospheric film. It’s horror-adjacent, the perfect bridge between late summer and early Fall.

I am still very much in a summer state of mind as I have a beach vacation coming up, but I am also a year-round horror lover. This movie gave me the dose of spookiness I crave without completely removing me from that sunny, toes-in-sand head space.

Something I really appreciated about “Séance on a Wet Afternoon” was how it managed to be quite a serious drama. Despite its absurd premise, the tone is neither campy nor overly humorous, in the way, say, “Arsenic and Old Lace” is.

Neither is it a satire in the way director Bryan Forbes’s later film “The Stepford Wives” is.

Even Myra’s madness never becomes too cartoonish. Stanley, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for this role, gives such a measured, almost reserved performance.

She’s quite frightening in the role, and her presence is domineering. Attenborough, who is perhaps best known to contemporary audiences as the industrialist John Hammond in the “Jurassic Park” series, plays the perfect whipping post, an unwilling participant in a game he can’t find the courage to stop playing.

However, there is a simmering rage behind Attenborough’s eyes, which adds to his calm, quiet performance.

Forbes, who also wrote the screenplay, truly directs the heck out of this movie. His framing is interesting and stylistic, without ever taking away from the brilliance of the lead performances.

Forbes treats his characters with compassion and sympathy. His script is a dialogue heavy in a way you’d expect a play to be, and I’m actually surprised this movie was based on a novel instead.

Forbes handles these scenes with such ease, and his blocking manages to make every shot intriguing, even if it’s just Mrya and Billy talking in their living room.

It’s also a superbly lit film. The production design adds so much dimension to each shot, in a way few modern films manage to accomplish with how often they use shallow depth of field.

I came away from this film with such a sick feeling in my stomach. The trauma that leads to Myra’s break with reality is incredibly painful and relatable.

It left me wondering how easy it is to become a prisoner of your mind, and how you might not even realize when you lose it.

In Frame is a weekly arts and entertainment column focusing on everything from pop culture and new movie releases to the local arts and culture found right here in NEPA. News reporter Margaret Roarty contribute to this column.

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