"Held captive somewhere between life and death..."

A woman and her friends accidentally drive off a bridge and fall in the water. She survives but loses her friends. From this moment on, she enters into a chronic trance. From time to time (and increasingly with time) she assists apparitions and seems to disappear from the sight of others. Then, she comes back to reality.

The people around her consider her to be strange and she feels she is being pulled from her life. When she consults a specialist, he explains that these are only post-traumatic symptoms and she shouldn’t be worried. However, faces appear in her bedroom window, in the windows of her car, in stairs. They seem to want to drag her to the death she just barely avoided.

Few people still respect the ancestors of horror movies. I suspect this movie to have inspired zombie movies and movies such as The Shining, The Sixth Sense and The Others. To appreciate this movie even more, I tried to project myself into those days. Without becoming terrifying, a few scenes surprised me. Each time Mary falls in a trance, the image turns to green (presumably a revolution back then) and shifts. This categorical change is interesting and we immediately start searching for the monster that will jump in our face.

The camera follows only one woman so it is hard to lose track of the development and become confused. Furthermore, there are no sub-stories to confound us other than a simple love story. The ending is astonishing and it surely would have made me shiver forty years ago.