4.5. One of the few genuinely frightening films. The ambiguity in Henry James' original has been reduced by several degrees to a more explicit cautionary tale about sexual depravity and repression, but Clayton's adaptation manages to create an unsettling and hypnotic psychological maze of its own with fluid, seemingly effortless long takes, the distorting and contrasting effects of the simultaneous uses of deep focus and extra-wide angle lens, an eerie atmospheric soundscape, and Deborah Kerr's perpetually frightened expression.