The film is curious with its plot, holding the audience’s attention from the beginning to the very end. Interest is a fairly frequent topic among writers and directors - classics and contemporaries working on an acute mystical soil, which is not surprising, because its roots go far into ancient superstitions, assigning cats the status of some mysterious creatures wandering on the verge of realism and supernatural between the two worlds.
The plot about a tailed witness of a murder, avenging the hostess to greedy relatives, driven by the desire to get an inheritance, is decorated with a couple of entertaining nuances. First, the picture was staged under the aegis of Hammer, which can rightfully promise the most luxurious background of antiquity, immersing a person on the other side of the screen in the proper Gothic layer of England, covered with a ghostly haze of otherworldly manifestations, harmoniously adjacent to the revered gentlemen and elegant ladies. Experienced director and screenwriter of the action genre John Gilling with knowledge works with the proposed material, conveying all the savor of the detective-mystical halo of British creepy stories of the classical pore, masterfully using only the black and white duplicity of the frame. “Picture” is filled with chiaroscuro in the right places, increasing the tension of the situation, and let not the stars, but frequent studio artists reliably fit into the proper images of their heroes and villains, conveying the necessary characters. Secondly, by touching upon something mysteriously elusive to the rational side of our life, by giving a graceful domestic animal with gleaming eyes the possibility of cunning revenge, the author does not resort to open mysticism at all. The events that take place adhere to reliability, which is why the viewer involuntarily develops empathy for the cat, because it is not a tailed ghost at all, but a small pet that has entered into an unequal fight.
It would be unfair to keep silent about the hidden layer of the story, metaphorically personifying the mustachioed cat as a symbol of obsessive conscience or justice, relentlessly pursuing all scoundrels until evil is rewarded to everyone. In fact, the domestic panopticum of vulture relatives under one roof could easily do without a four-legged catalyst for action, since they are demonstratively ready to bite each other's throats for the sake of inheritance, reducing their own number well. And this is also very interesting when viewed from a morally instructive point of view, where absolutely all the participants in the crime, indirect or direct, one way or another, are doomed to a deliberate failure for the lack of the ability to trust anyone in the vicious circle of mercantile accomplices without morality and principles.
In general, the tape promises to appeal to all connoisseurs of the British classical school of horror, which is able to create worthy samples of the genre, flawlessly played out in many technical aspects on the appropriate non-stupid scenario.
8 out of 10