This Gothic-romantic costume drama about colonial life in the West Indies (the heat, the drums, the perspiry chests) comes from highborn literary stock: Jean Rhys's speculative "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Or in a nutshell: whence the madwoman in the attic? But the Australian filmmaker John Duigan, the man responsible for the likably laid-back Flirting and The Year My Voice Broke, seems on this project somewhat out of his depth. Notwithstanding the underwater dream scenes (tentacle-like seaweed, slow-motion) and a black-magic potion scene (distorting camera lens, lots of candles), the direction is a bit neutral, detached, uncommitted, unatmospheric. For the opposite properties, especially the opposite of the last one, you could hardly do better than go back to that earlier alliance between Jane Eyre and the West Indies: Val Lewton's I Walked with a Zombie. With Karina Lombard, Nathaniel Parker, Rachel Ward, Michael York. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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