Dry Ice Factory

'I'm never more witty than when I've had a little nip. I see better, I hear better, and I feel much better.'

-- Elsa Lanchester as Mrs. Oates in The Spiral Staircase (1946). I've got a thing for Elsa. She is mostly comic relief in this film, and she's perfect in that niche, wearing big clothes to make her seem plumper, a kindly clown. The beautiful girls are murdered in the dark, but Mrs. Oates just gets drunk on stolen brandy and passes out by the kitchen fire. There's also a strange scene where the mute girl gives out a strangled cry that sounds remarkably like Elsa's iconic screech as the Bride of Frankenstein.

Like Inception (2010), The Locket is perhaps notable more for its elaborate structure and visual pleasures than for the somewhat banal story it tells. But instead of Inception's dream-within-a-dream structure, The Locket's structure is a flashback-within-a-flashback that goes down three levels, with each flashback from another character's point of view. As with Inception we return to the current time frame level by level, giving closure to each flashback along the way, and the question of closure lingers over this neat narrative gimmick. For one thing, the deeper the flashback, the further the narrative drifts from the person allegedly narrating -- second hand, third hand, fourth hand -- thus raising the question of reliability as well. There is also a murder in one flashback that we're never sure is actually solved. At the center of it all is the femme fatale, Nancy, a kleptomaniac living in a delusional world. Unlike other Freudian movies of the '40s (e.g., Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945)), it's not clear that Nancy's trauma is healed by bringing it to the surface. In fact, the memory only seems to cause further trauma.



( Lotsa screencaps, and a few quotes ... )