Critics reviews

The cottage by the edge of the sea is really on the border of the beyond, just the realm for the "blooming revolution" of a woman's self-actualization... The candle in the staircase and the telescope on the balcony, the four-letter word pecked on the typewriter and the lady's handkerchief seized and sniffed at the train station—uncommon gradations and harmonies curated by Mankiewicz with the support of one of Bernard Herrmann's most sublime scores.

The achingly impossible bond of the living and the dead—or of a body and a soul—stands in gloriously in for all doomed romances and all-possessing fantasies. Mankiewicz stage-manages the ectoplasmic games of appearances and disappearances, of thrown voices and untoward nudges, with a subtly expressive flair.