Audrey Rose
By Kit Macdonald
"Suppose a stranger told you your daughter was his daughter in a previous life? Suppose you began to believe him? Suppose it was true?"
Anthony Hopkins stars as the "stranger" in this thoroughly chilling piece of work from director Robert Wise, released in 1977 and adapted from Frank De Felitta's book of the same name from a couple of years previously.
A seemingly ordinary New York family – Bill and Janice Templeton and their 11-year-old daughter Ivy – have their lives upended when Hopkins' Elliot Hoover comes into their lives and insists that Ivy is the reincarnation of his daughter, Audrey Rose, who died in a car crash. Hoover’s obsession with Ivy intensifies as the girl begins to suffer from terrifying nightmares and trance-like episodes that seem to align with Audrey’s death. Wise carries off what follows with skill, going for a muted, eerie atmosphere, and ambiguity and emotional tension over overt supernatural spectacle.