Mackendrick introduced a new strain of realism into his films with this moving story of a deaf child whose refusal to reach outside her cocoon of silence traumatizes her middle-class parents and threatens to destroy their unstable relationship. The first in Mackendrick's trilogy about precocious and destructive children, Mandy is an absolutely fascinating melding of The Miracle Worker's semi-documentary theater and Brief Encounter's fractured and intensely first-person melodrama of marital dissatisfaction.

Mackendrick returns to the idea of childhood's uncanny will to destruction in this adaptation of a novel about a young British boy who bravely sets off alone on a trek to visit family in South Africa after his parents' are killed in Egypt’s 1956 Suez crisis. Neither hapless victim nor sentimentalized child, the boy wanders clear-eyed through a series of encounters that reveal the limited choices of possible adult lives available in the late colonial era – including the false role model offered by Edward G. Robinson as a cutthroat diamond smuggler. Mackendrick himself evocatively described Sammy as “the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everything he comes up against.”