The film is about the composer Rick, who was spending his vacation on the English coast. The composer Rick Fitzgerald and his sister Pamela found an abandoned 18th-century house where they suddenly decided to buy it. It seems that things are not so good in this abandoned house and soon discover that the reason that the price is very cheap is the home's most dangerous past.
The real strength of the film, though, is its atypical stance part way between psychology and the supernatural, achieving a disturbingly serious effect.
An archetypal 40s ghost story, ambitiously decked out in high studio finery, with billowing curtains and other kinds of hyperromantic kitsch that can put you in mind of death by tuberculosis, though ultimately it's a bit of a letdown.
'This is the only way I can paint you,' says Milland, at the piano. 'Some black keys, and some white.' The speaker might as well be cinematographer Charles Lang, whose painterly compositions -- some black keys, and some white -- make this a spooky gem.
The Uninvited was...one of the first films to treat the supernatural seriously, and to play ghosts and hauntings as something other than fodder for comedy.
