The Haunting of Julia/Full Circle (1977), directed by Richard Loncraine; starring Mia Farrow, Keir Dullea, Jill Bennett, and Cathleen Nesbit.
Caution: Mild Spoilers Ahead
I must confess that I’m a Mia-Farrow-phobe. The only film I’ve ever liked her in is Rosemary’s Baby. Her quivery-voiced, little-girl-lost demeanor was perfect for her role in that iconic piece of cinema.
In this film, known as The Haunting of Julia in the US and Full Circle in Europe, Farrow plays another wounded waif character, but she’s now in her early 30s, and the same demeanor is verging on the ridiculous. However, Farrow and her annoying quivery voice aside, this is a very good film. It is based on the novel Julia by Peter Straub, which happens to be one of my favorite books.
Farrow plays Julia Lofting, the grieving mother of a deceased girl, aged 10. The film opens with a scene that is very hard to watch: Julia’s daughter, Kate, chokes on a piece of apple and can’t breathe. Julia tries to save her life by performing a tracheotomy with a steak knife, and ends up cutting her throat, causing Kate to bleed to death. It’s a parent’s worst nightmare, and Loncraine doesn’t soft-soap it at all. Frankly, I usually skip over this scene when I re-watch this movie.
The death of Kate stresses Julia’s already-troubled marriage to Magnus, a domineering, macho professor (played by Keir Dullea from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). Julia is an heiress with piles of FU money, and she moves out on Magnus and buys an old mansion in the Kensington Borough area of London. After some strange occurrences in the house, Julia begins to investigate its history.
She finds that it was once occupied by a rich society woman named Heather Rudge and her ten-year-old daughter, Olivia. Olivia died in the house. Old photos uncovered by Julia show that Olivia resembled Kate, and Julia becomes convinced that the girl’s ghost has some kind of connection with Kate’s departed soul.
She tracks down and interviews the now-adult people who knew Olivia, and discovers that Olivia wasn’t a very nice little girl. She was a neighborhood bully who tortured animals and bullied the weak, resulting in the death of a little boy. Strangely, everyone whom Julia interviews about Olivia seems to end up dying in an awful “accident.”
The film is not perfect; it leaves out a crucial bit of information from the novel that explains why Olivia is haunting Julia. It also kills off a major character who is very much alive by the end of the book. However, it does offer great, atmospheric cinematography by Peter Hannan, who shot Children of Men (2006) for Alfonso Cuaron, and a brilliant score by Colin Towns, one of the creepiest I’ve ever heard. For fans of moody, slow-burning, intellectual 70s horror like Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) (which this film greatly resembles) it’s tough to beat The Haunting of Julia.
Side note: If you've never visited Kindertrauma, from whence I obtained the above photo, please do so immediately. It is a treasure-trove of often-hilarious commentary about the thriller/horror/sci-fi films that traumatized many of us as children.
