No sooner has live-in nurse Meredith Stone (Patricia Pearcy, Squirm) joined the payroll of cranky old paraplegic inventor Mr. Langrock (Joseph Cotten, Shadow of a Doubt) than she’s told only a single room of his estate is off-limits. Specifically, the one that’s locked up. The same one she spotted someone in, standing at its window, upon her arrival via Yellow Cab. The one she should never, ever enter under any circumstances whatsoever.
“Ooh, how Gothic: a locked room!” coos a minor character played by Death Race 2000’s Simone Griffeth, and she’s not wrong. But whereas most movies of this ilk would spin such a setup across three dark and stormy acts, Delusion unlocks that riddle in its first 15 minutes, which is to say of course Meredith enters the room.
The real mystery kicks in after Mr. Langrock’s teen grandson (Jaws 2’s John Dukakis, son of Michael) arrives from being raised on a commune. That’s when people at the estate start to die, in classic whodunit fashion. Certainly a kid so far removed from society that he doesn’t recognize a skateboard must be the culprit, right?
Unassuming in nature (especially when shorn of its alternate, oxymoronic title, The House Where Death Lives), Delusion is two-thirds Agatha Christie, one-third Michael Myers and all-around quietly nifty, marking a promising debut for director Alan Beattie. However, some of its advantages might be accidental. For example, the abode’s small doorways lend a discomforting, cramped feel … but that’s how the house was built. For another, the main actors’ unfamiliarity to viewers (the legendary Cotten excepted) mean audiences’ preconceived notions can’t apply … likely a budgetary necessity than a calculated play.
Supporting my theory, the only other movie Beattie helmed, Stand Alone, is as formulaic as you’d expect from a mid-’80s Death Wish imitation. That sophomore slump lacks the well-constructed script first-timer Jack Viertel delivered for Delusion: tense and peculiar, with the kind of kink Brian De Palma would’ve maximized for a field day of a film. Strange that Viertel never wrote another movie, abandoning La-La Land for enormous success on the Great White Way.
Most cruelly, Pearcy doesn’t waste her leading-lady opportunity, yet her face hasn’t graced a screen any larger than a television — a mystery in itself. —Rod Lott