Just Screenshots: The Night Visitor (1971)

The Night Visitor (1971)

aka

Salem Come to Supper

Lunatic

Der unheimliche Besucher

Papegojan

Going straight in at the deep end, The Night Visitor begins with a lone man heading silent over a snowy landscape to arrive at a farmhouse. Entering through a window, this tale of a man called Salem and his dark deeds begins. See, Salem has been wrongfully imprisoned for a couple of years and now has come the time for a spot of vengeance. Directed by Laszlo Benedek of teen rebellion classic The Wild One, The Night Visitor is a highly unusual item, filled with warped intensity. Snowy fields and forlorn buildings, treachery bubbling beneath almost every character, the film is in a state of constant unease, and by leaping straight into events and offering explanations in erratic bursts the viewer is kept mostly just outside of the loop, hooked but never quite certain of things. The film has a madness to it and everyone is either afflicted or drawn into the fray, only an investigating policeman remains pretty much sane. Apart from the interest of Salem's inscrutably macabre deeds, his very presence is a bad influence on other characters, stirring their dark secrets and quiet unease to storming froth, creating madness by a near supernatural force of proximity. As played by Max von Sydow Salem is determined and malign, but mostly calm, a contrast to the jitters of everybody else. (IMDB Bloodwank)