Mini-Review: michele morgan's seaside midnight ponderings exist as haunting visualizations of spiritual mortality: she stands encased in a virginal white dress as her tearful visage washes in and out of a mass of rushing water in a series of ethereal crossfades, her attire changing to a deep black gown in a starling narrative fissure that stylistically and conceptually lays the course for the film's later immersions into the characters' murky subconscious. mystifying and beautiful. arthur ripley was insane.

Mini-Review: brilliant, confrontational, incisively perversive. there's more than a shade of zulawski's POSSESSION in the film's late developments, even going beyond both parents' sexual contact with their not-quite-human son/daughter/it and into dren's thorough rapture of their relationship and respective backgrounds, most significantly polley's emotionally neglectful childhood and how she brings dren to be ostensibly nurtured at the place where she faced her deepest psychological bruising.

Mini-Review: if fatherhood was the original film's central consideration, the expanded scope of the sequel allows cohen an affecting depiction of horrific maternal grief and self-doubt; the culmination comes when kathleen lloyd asks john p. ryan when she'll see her child again and he responds "maybe it's better that you don't," his answer clearly referring to much more than the danger of the child ripping its mother to shreds, and it is in that emotional gulf where the crux of cohen's trenchant genius lays.