The Grey Room

An English country house weekend curdles into dread when a returned sailor accepts a deadly dare. Tom May, lately of the war, has married Mary Lennox and come to her father's estate for the first time, but Chadlands holds secrets in its oldest room. The Grey Room, sealed since a tragedy years ago, whispers of death, and when Tom laughs at old fears and sleeps there, he awakens something that has been waiting. Beneath the polished surfaces of Sir Walter's manor, nephew Henry still carries torch for cousin Mary; old tensions between tradition and modernity simmer; and the supernatural intrudes on the rational world with terrible patience. Phillpotts, the master who gave Hitchcock 'The Farmer's Wife,' weaves ghost story and drawing-room drama into something that lingers like fog against windows. This is English Gothic at its most seductive: polite on the surface, rotten underneath.