The Road Builder

Brown rules the roost in her rambling old mansion, gossiping with cronies about the vicar's (entirely imaginary) sex-change operation and visiting casual cruelties on her aging adopted daughter (Neal). Her other mistake is to hire personable itinerant Clay to look after the garden, when someone called the Travelling Maniac is on the loose. Starting as an analogue of Night Must Fall, Dahl's script segues fascinatingly into areas explored contemporaneously in Chabrol's Le Boucher. The contributions of Thomson, Pratt and Herrmann are exemplary, but Reid is the sort of plodding director something of this sort absolutely doesn't need. From the novel Nest in a Falling Tree by Joy Cowley.