Intimate Relations

And now for something completely twisted. Rosemary Clooney singing the playfully seductive "Come On-A My House" instantly hooks viewers into this perverse black comedy based on a 1950s British murder case. Rupert Graves stars as the unfortunate Harold, a lodger whose new landlady (a superb Julie Walters of Educating Rita fame) insists she would "rather be dead than brazen," but soon finds her way into his room. When her precocious, underage daughter (Laura Sandler) learns of the affair, she insists on joining them. Eccentric comic touches (an amputee washing his leg at the kitchen table) and deadpan dialogue give way to an inevitable bloody denouement, but like Harold, we're trapped in the company of these indelible characters. Recommended. (K. Lee Benson)