Soap opera tension and voodoo magic in the dreamily depicted West Indies. Producer Val Lewton’s second “psychological horror” film that he made for RKO Pictures is the eeriest of them all. Its premise is partly lifted from Jane Eyre. Frances Dee is a nurse who travels from snowy Canada to the sunny Caribbean to take a job caring for the catatonic wife of wealthy sugar plantation owner Tom Conway. It’s not long before Dee and Conway fall in love, but she’s a wholesome gal so nothing happens. Instead, she decides to make him happy by finding a cure for his wife. Traditional medicine isn’t working though, and she becomes convinced that the natives’ nightly voodoo rituals might help.
One of Lewton’s favorite directors, the great Jacques Tourneur, helms this one (working with a script by Ardel Wray and Wolf Man writer, Curt Siodmak). In under seventy minutes, Tourneur draws out a spectral atmosphere that’ll haunt you all night. As in most of Lewton and Tourneur’s best films, the pace is deliberate and the storytelling makes a point of artful ambiguity. The scene where Dee and the wife walk through a field of tall sugar cane stalks on the way to a late night voodoo ceremony is a beautiful visual highlight.