Based on the Broadway play, this is one of Columbia Pictures’ very few Gothic films, and one of the finest of the genre in the 1940s. Ida Lupino plays a spinster housekeeper and live-in companion who brings her “crazy” sisters (Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett) to the secluded mansion, later joined by their shady nephew (Louis Hayward) whose main interest is in the wealth of the gullible lady of the house. The film swiftly and stylishly spirals into madness, morbidity and even murder. The entire production was highly unusual for Columbia, notably for its use of chiaroscuro lighting—a rarity for the studio in the 1940s, despite some earlier flirtations with expressionistic imagery in the 1930s—and for its Victorian England setting. Much of the film’s outstanding quality can be credited to the underrated, Budapest-born Charles Vidor, who would go on to direct the 1946 Columbia hit Gilda. Here, he crafts a film that shows signs of an ahead-of-its-time approach to pacing and surprising narrative ellipses.