Why haven't I ever heard of this movie before?  It's rare for me to discover a movie that I've never heard of.  I'm a huge movie geek and I watch hundreds of movies a year (literally) so I've heard of more movies than most people, but I saw this title on Netflix and I've never heard of it (nor did I know anything about it coming in, which I think is a good thing in the case of this movie because it saved me from having any preconceptions about it).  I read that it was about a young woman and the search for her missing daughter, and based on that description alone, I was intrigued enough to check it out.

So the movie opens and we see a young woman wondering the halls of a private school, making arrangements for her young daughter, whom we never see.  This left me with an unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach.  After arrangements are made at the school, the young woman then leaves, bustles about her new house and about town running errands, chats with her brother (whom she treats like a husband which left me further unsettled), meets her landlord, who is overly melodramatic and makes sexual advances on her (unsettling moment number three...my poor stomach...get me some TUMS, stat), and then after this full afternoon that appears to have taken place in The Twilight Zone, the young woman returns to the school to retrieve her daughter. Surprise! Her daughter isn't there, and as time passes and she searches every room of the school, with no sign of her daughter at all, she slowly begins to fall apart.  She first calls her brother who rushes over to the school and demands that they search for the girl.

After the police convince the young woman to go home and the lieutenant begins to question the young woman, it becomes clear that he doesn't think the missing daughter ever existed.  This is distressing to me, but then, as a viewer, I haven't seen the little girl at all, so I can neither confirm nor deny these suspicions.  The woman and her brother are both acting so weird that I don't know which end is up, and the movie is ambiguous for so long about the details behind what's really going on here that I felt disoriented and a little high (I started wondering if I'd dropped acid before watching the movie and had simply forgotten).  It's very rare that movie can do this to me.  I've seen so many movies that I'm wise to their tricks by this point, so to find a movie that had me actually stumped was a real treat.

The acting in this movie is very strong.  The aforementioned lieutenant is played by Laurence Olivier, and I'll go ahead and say it, he grates on my last working nerve.  I don't care if he's a legend, every performance I've seen from him makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a garden trowel (yes, I've seen his "Hamlet;" no, I wasn't impressed).  But in this movie, he is wonderfully understated in a way that surprised me.  I'll just come right out and say it: I didn't know that Hacky McOveractor, he who never met some scenery he couldn't chew, would be capable of pulling off a performance this subtle.  Way to prove me wrong.  The brother is played by Keir Duella, and as I recall, he had me guessing back when I first saw him in the original "Black Christmas," so I've been a fan for quite some time.  I'd never heard of Carol Lynley, who played the young mother Ann, before I saw this movie, but she was top notch.  She walks the line between being hysterical and endearing, between keeping us guessing and annoying the hell out of us, and she does it with panache.

After I saw this movie (and it left me with my head spinning) I did some research, and it turns out that after this movie was made, it was dismissed by the filmmakers as worthless, and it was left to rot in cheap little grind houses, marketed with the tagline "No one admitted while the clock is ticking!"  The tagline belies an understanding of the film's mysterious nature, and after seeing it, I was saddened that this little gem was dismissed so easily and left to languish amongst such dreck as "Night of the Lepus" and "Attack of the Giant Leeches."  Don 't get me wrong, I love those movies, but not in the way I love this one.  This movie has style, substance, class, wit, and mystery, and it deserves to be seen by people who appreciate it for the great little slice of filmmaking it is.

Watch this movie and remember what it's like to be baffled, befuddled, bemused, and bewildered by a mystery that manages to still be mysterious, even after all these years.

• Average Shot Length (ASL) = 21 seconds (very high by the standards of "popular" 1960s cinema).