Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Cardinal Biggles This is SOOOOO 1960s. Stark monochrome, visually crafted; intelligent, suspenseful dialogue, a modestly paced intense build up of the characters and plot, clever musical accents; the psychological twists, the interaction of the characters - the dark sociopath, the compliant and ineffective hen-pecked husband accomplice. Marvellous. This is a modest budget film, yet very intense, very sinister with all sorts of taboos explored in the medium (pardon the pun) of a séance. No CGI, no mega explosions every five minutes, no car chases or corny catch phrases, and definitely no expensive sets. Just a house in Wimbledon, a seedy lounge set and a penurious David Attenborough reduced to running a motorbike and sidecar for their mastermind crime..... complete with old duffer motorbike helmet and gauntlets Great performances. These characters are the stuff that serial killers are made of, and they scared the sh*t out of me!

James Hitchcock The title of this film is a bit baffling. Two séances play an important part in the plot, but neither takes place on a wet afternoon. One takes place in the evening, the other on an obviously fine day. Perhaps its significance is clearer in the original novel, which I have never read.Billy and Myra Savage, a middle-aged, middle-class suburban couple, kidnap Amanda, the young daughter of a wealthy businessman. Although they send her father a ransom note, their motive is not financial. Even though Billy is unable to work because of ill health, they live in a large, imposing Victorian house and are clearly not short of money. Rather Myra, a medium who holds séances in her home, believes that she can become famous for her supposed psychic abilities by helping the police to solve the crime.When I first saw this film many years ago I disliked it for what I saw as a lack of realism. How on earth did Billy and Myra imagine that they were going to get away with a plan so obviously badly conceived and badly executed? Looking back, I can see that my criticism was unfair and that I had been unduly influenced by films in which a gang of master- criminals put together an intricate, seemingly foolproof, scheme only to come unstuck because of some minor detail, of the tenacity or brilliance of the investigating detective, or of sheer bad luck. Because the truth is that Billy and Myra are not brilliant master- criminals. Far from it. She is mentally unstable and detached from reality to the extent that she hardly realises that she is committing a crime. She insists that she is merely "borrowing" Amanda, not kidnapping her. She believes that she is in touch with the spirit of her son Arthur, who died at birth, but fails to realise that she does not actually have any psychic abilities. If she did, she would not have to go through such a ridiculous charade in order to "demonstrate" them. As for her husband, he is merely a weak and cowardly little man unable to stand up to his domineering wife, although at the end he does display a greater humanity than she is capable of.This is the only film in which I have ever seen Kim Stanley. She was, apparently, a theatre and television actress who had only appeared in one previous feature film, "The Goddess", and was only the third choice for the role of Myra, Deborah Kerr and Simone Signoret having turned it down. Yet she is excellent here, showing us the way in which her self- deluded character's personality disintegrates bit by bit to the point where she can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality and can see no objection to killing Amanda. Richard Attenborough, the film's co- producer and her co-star, paid tribute to her "complexity of dramatic impression". She received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (losing to Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins) but this did not persuade her to make a career in films. It was to be another eighteen years before she appeared in another film, "Frances". (She was Oscar nominated for that as well). Attenborough is also very good as the cowed Billy.This was the third film directed by Bryan Forbes, who had made such a brilliant start to his directing career with "Whistle Down the Wind", one of the great classics of the British cinema; his wife Nanette Newman appears as Amanda's mother. Like Forbes's two earlier films (his second was "The L-Shaped Room"), this one is in black-and-white, something still regularly used in Britain (unlike America) during the mid-sixties, probably because colour television had not yet come to Britain. I was reminded of some of the early works of Alfred Hitchcock, especially "Shadow of a Doubt", another psychological thriller about a young girl in danger and which takes place in a seemingly tranquil suburb. "Séance on a Wet Afternoon" doesn't have quite the same emotional impact as something like "Whistle Down the Wind", largely because the two leading characters are so unsympathetic. It is, however, a taut and engrossing psychological drama.

Paris55 I agree with the comment provided by author djlink, Alexandria, VA regarding the Oscars. Unfortunately for Kim Stanley in "Seance on a Wet Afternoon" Julie Andrews won the Oscar not for her performance in Mary Poppins BUT for the controversy over Andrews not getting the part in the movie "My Fair Lady". Andrews created the part on Broadway. When the movie was cast, the producers chose Audrey Hepburn, for name recognition. Many in Hollywood industry and the Academy were not thrilled over the slight and thought that was a major mistake, therefore giving Andrews the Oscar for Mary Poppins, no matter who else was nominated and their performance. This happens much too often and in recent years as of 2011. The Oscars are more political now than they were back in the 1960s.

Robert J. Maxwell The first time I saw this I thought it was dull. Now it doesn't seem dull so much as a little sluggish. If the plot is described in print, it sounds like a lively suspense film -- the professional medium Kim Stanley and her reluctant husband Richard Attenborough decide to kidnap the little daughter of a rich family and collect a big ransom before returning her. As lagnappe, Stanley will even volunteer her services as a clairvoyant to "help" the family get the girl back. Every move has been thoroughly planned by Stanley.But -- the best-laid schemes of mice and men and Stanley and Attenborough and me gang aft agley. During one of her professional afternoon séances, with the kidnapped girl ensconced in the next room with Attenborough, Stanley faints. Attenborough rushes to her side. The guests leave, but in his haste Attenborough has forgotten to lock the door to the little girl's room and she appears at the top of the staircase, seeing Stanley's and Attenborough's faces for the first time in all their unmasked glory. You can see why she has to die.The coppers have been nosing around, full of suspicion, as soon as Stanley volunteered to help them by providing some accurate observations about the kidnapped victim, such as the name of her favorite toy. Now they show up in earnest, persuade Stanley to conduct another séance, and, in a state, she spills all the beans.These altered states of consciousness are interesting phenomena, both from a psychological and a sociological perspective. They're real enough. They take all kinds of different forms with different names -- spirit possession, voodoo, speaking in tongues, confusional awakening state, hypnosis, multiple personality, fugue. Nobody has a clear idea of what causes them or how to avoid them.Anyway, okay, this time around I got the general idea that kidnapping the little girl was a means of providing a temporary substitute for the couple's stillborn baby, Arthur. It's not an unintelligent script. But, if the symbolic status of the victim weren't spelled out in the dialog, you'd have a hard time figuring it out because neither Stanley nor her tag-along husband treat the girl with any tenderness or concern, except when it's in aid of their own interest to do so.Attenborough is in his mousy persona here, an interesting actor if a somewhat clumsy director. Kim Stanley I understand had a highly respectable career on the stage. She only made a few movies and, for whatever reason, didn't make much of an impression in any of them, including this one. As was the case with Helen Hayes, another stage star, something didn't go click as the cameras rolled. Nanette Newman is the beautiful, vacuous mother of the little girl. Patrick Magee is super-duper as the Chief Inspector. He's always good. Catch him drooling and going berserk in "A Clockwork Orange."