Susan returns to Dunwich after many years of absence accompanied by her husband Mike, with whom she lives in New York. The girl has come back to reclaim an inheritance, an old mill where she lived as a child and now abandoned. Upon arriving at the place, they immediately encounter the hostility of the locals who warn them about the curse that weighs on the old mill. The couple does not pay attention to the rumors, but, in addition to Ethan's pranks, also an heir to the building, they begin to confront a mysterious presence that seems to really inhabit the place.
Lovecraft and cinema have met a relatively low number of times. There are works officially adapted from his writings, including "The City of Monsters", "The Virgins of Dunwich", "Re-animator", "The Creature" and "Dagon", others that in one way or another are inspired by the universe of the "Recluse of Providence" (I cite one title above all: "The Seed of Madness"). Among the first is the little-known "The Shuttered Room", adaptation of the eponymous novel ("The Shuttered Room", in the original) that Lovecraft wrote with the friend August Derleth.
The setting of the film directed by the television David Greene is typically Lovecraftian: a rural reality in which there is hostility towards those who come from outside, a horrible secret hidden in time between the walls of a decaying place, a situation in which the boundary between good and evil is decidedly tenuous. The director Greene and the screenwriter D.B. Ledrov, therefore, do an excellent job of adaptation evoking the right atmospheres that belong however to a more earthly Lovecraft, far from the Great Ancients and ancestral fears.
The main theme of "The Shuttered Room" is the family and what the degeneration of this institution can cause. The dazzling beginning shows us a domestic focus threatened by an undefined and undefined evil that vents on the young offspring in an attempt to deny the continuity that will have clarification only in the final revelation. The prologue and epilogue focus on Susan's family nucleus and the secrets she has hidden for years, a family nucleus now extinct of which survive scattered parental glimpses in the Dunwich countryside. Everything that is connected to Susan's family brings with it a sense of wrong: the parents died in mysterious circumstances, the aunt talks about an ancient curse and the cousin desires her sexually in an insistent and ostentatious way. The only positive thing for Susan is her bond with her husband Mike, a man at least forty years older than her who clearly embodies a paternal figure for the woman as well as marital.
Good management of events and tension, which alternates more static moments aimed at the evolution of the characters with moments of action and fear. In this regard, only the beautiful ending leaves a certain bitterness in the mouth for a lack of explanations, necessary in this case to clarify some events that seem obvious to the characters but completely obscure to the viewer.
Excellent performance by the cast, in which Oliver Reed ("The Implacable Condemnation"; "The Gladiator"), who plays the role of the gruff cousin Ethan, and Carol Lynley ("The Poseidon Adventure") stand out, who plays the fragile Susan. Gig Young ("A Black Ribbon for Deborah") and Flora Robson ("Clash of the Titans") complete the picture of a varied and well-chosen cast.
"The Shuttered Room" deserves to be rediscovered, a good film that has aged well and is capable of making us know a minor Lovecraft, the more earthly one that tells us about horrors linked to superstition and rural reality.
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