Gaslight

George Cukor
1944

Famed director of "women's films," George Cukor, directs an excellent psychological thriller, one of the genres less represented in the lavish MGM canon. Musical ingenue Ingrid Bergman marries sweetheart Charles Boyer in a fever, but this pepper sprout quickly turns cold as the couple moves into Ingrid's murdered mother's home, and her husband becomes increasingly antagonistic and manipulative. The grim chamber drama is rounded out with a limited cast: Joseph Cotton (sans transatlantic accent), Dame May Whitty as a local busybody, and a very young Angela Lansbury as the sassy strumpet maid. The emotional abuse Boyer heaps on Bergman is genuinely discomforting, and his final comeuppance isn't nearly satisfying enough, giving the film a deeply unfeminist feel. I found the suffering inflicted upon Ingrid Bergman here to be far more disturbing than anything in Pascal Laugier's notorious "Martyrs" (2008).