Night Hair Child (a.k.a What The Peeper Saw) is a pretty depraved thriller that largely embarrasses its well-known cast. It is quite uncomfortable to watch a 12-year old lad engaging in a game of sexual cat-and-mouse with a 22-year old woman, but the film might have just about got away with it if a subtler approach had been adopted. When we have such scenes as the woman performing a strip to tease information out of the boy, or climbing into bed with him whilst naked in a bizarre dream sequence, the film goes beyond the boundaries of good taste. Things that could have been effective if implied suddenly become explicit
and the potential for a dark psychological thriller is replaced by an emphasis on exploitation and sleaze.
After the death of his mother in a bath accident, Marcus (Mark Lester) goes away to boarding school while his father Paul (Hardy Kruger) buys a villa in a remote region of Spain to escape the memory of his loss. A couple of years later, 41-year old Paul has remarried to a 22-year old woman named Elise (Britt Ekland). Marcus, now 12, arrives at the villa unexpectedly while his father is away, claiming that his school has been shut down due to a chicken pox outbreak. It is the first time Elise and the boy have met. It soon strikes her that young Marcus is quite a disturbed boy – and her fears grow when she learns that he has actually been expelled from school after torturing then killing a cat. Paul cannot seem to accept that there is anything wrong with his son, but Elise is sure of it. Things get even creepier when young Marcus starts to make sexual advances towards her and, in his ultimate mind game, confesses to her that he actually murdered his real mother two years earlier. Elise is trapped in a vortex of lies, mind games and sexual threat, and her sanity is pushed to the brink
It would take some mighty fine performances to make these characters work and none of the three leads manage it. Kruger doesn't react believably to anything that happens; Ekland can't shrug her sex symbol image to bring conviction to the role; and Lester is mostly wooden when he should in fact be chilling us to the bone. It is left to a pair of guest stars – Harry Andrews as the school headmaster and Lilli Palmer as a callous psychologist – to deliver the film's only memorable performances, but their roles are so peripheral to the main story that they can't rescue the film. The plot is rather intriguing – there's always something morbidly fascinating about child villains in the movies – but the handling fails to do it justice. On the whole, Night Hair Child is a let-down, a film that has the potential to be chilling but wastes it, instead emerging as a sleazy melodrama with too much focus on sensationalism at the expense of actual psychological thrills.
After the death of his mother in a bath accident, Marcus (Mark Lester) goes away to boarding school while his father Paul (Hardy Kruger) buys a villa in a remote region of Spain to escape the memory of his loss. A couple of years later, 41-year old Paul has remarried to a 22-year old woman named Elise (Britt Ekland). Marcus, now 12, arrives at the villa unexpectedly while his father is away, claiming that his school has been shut down due to a chicken pox outbreak. It is the first time Elise and the boy have met. It soon strikes her that young Marcus is quite a disturbed boy – and her fears grow when she learns that he has actually been expelled from school after torturing then killing a cat. Paul cannot seem to accept that there is anything wrong with his son, but Elise is sure of it. Things get even creepier when young Marcus starts to make sexual advances towards her and, in his ultimate mind game, confesses to her that he actually murdered his real mother two years earlier. Elise is trapped in a vortex of lies, mind games and sexual threat, and her sanity is pushed to the brink
It would take some mighty fine performances to make these characters work and none of the three leads manage it. Kruger doesn't react believably to anything that happens; Ekland can't shrug her sex symbol image to bring conviction to the role; and Lester is mostly wooden when he should in fact be chilling us to the bone. It is left to a pair of guest stars – Harry Andrews as the school headmaster and Lilli Palmer as a callous psychologist – to deliver the film's only memorable performances, but their roles are so peripheral to the main story that they can't rescue the film. The plot is rather intriguing – there's always something morbidly fascinating about child villains in the movies – but the handling fails to do it justice. On the whole, Night Hair Child is a let-down, a film that has the potential to be chilling but wastes it, instead emerging as a sleazy melodrama with too much focus on sensationalism at the expense of actual psychological thrills.