"The Attic" is one of the more difficult movies I rated and reviewed in the past couple of years. It's a movie that evokes contradictory sentiments, to say the least. I liked it but wouldn't watch it again anytime soon. It's terribly slow-paced yet atmospheric and foreboding. Half of the storylines that feature in the script are irrelevant, but they nevertheless form good and compelling material. The denouement is incredibly predictable, and yet immensely shocking when it finally comes. One thing's for sure, though, it's a fascinating movie that still spooks through my head several days later, and that alone makes me recommend it.
For starters, and let's get this straight, "The Attic" is not a horror movie. Those who are expecting to find monsters or torture devices in the attic will be sorely disappointed and, in fact, the title remains entirely irrelevant up until the Grand Guignol end-twist. Instead, however, the film is a harrowing drama and psychological character study of a poor woman trapped in her own miserable daily routines. Louise Elmore is about to lose her job as librarian, as she'll be replaced by a younger person, and the only other occupancy she has is looking after her tyrannical, insulting and wheelchair-bound father. Louise was engaged once, and the future looked bright, but her fiance disappeared on their wedding day. She never gave up hoping he'd return, though. Life slightly gets better for Louise when she befriends Emily, her successor at the library, and receives a pet chimp from her. Her father gets becomes increasingly loathsome, though, and genuine tragedies are about to happen.
The movie owes a lot of its emotional impact to the stellar performance by Carrie Snodgress. Unless you have no heart, you will feel sincere empathy for poor Louise who's weak and insecure due to the lifelong mental abuse by her father, and you can't but cheer out loud when fantasizes about murdering him. The character depicted by Ray Milland is arguably the worst type of villain/monster imaginable. He doesn't wear a scary mask or wields a knife, but he emotionally destroys the daughter he's supposed to love. I would say that Milland gives away a phenomenal performance, but he basically has been playing the exact same role throughout the 70s and 80s, namely that of the embittered, and downright despicable old man (preferably in a wheelchair). Check out "Terror in the Wax Museum", "The Uncanny", "Mayday at 40,000ft", "Frogs", and "The House in Nightmare Park" for similar roles of his. Fact remains that Milland remains brilliant, and he has a handful of magnificent scenes, like when he's arguing with the pet chimp Dickie, or when he sits in in his bathtub throwing insults at Louise while wearing a silly and redundant shower cap.
"The Attic" is also a sort of spin-off/sequel to "The Killing Kind", in which the characters of Louise and her father Wendell appeared as well. You don't necessarily need to have seen "The Killing Kind" to enjoy this movie, though.
