The Haunted Airman

Twilight's Robert Pattinson plays an injured, possibly delusional RAF pilot in this gothic mystery-romance based on the 1948 bestseller by Dennis Wheatley, The Haunting of Toby Jugg. After Germans shoot down the plane carrying Lt. Jugg over Cologne, his uncle's widow, Julia (Rachael Stirling), checks him into Llanferdach, a convalescent facility in Wales, to recover from his wounds (the script avoids modern terms like “spinal cord injury” and “post-traumatic stress disorder”). To conserve energy, the lights stay off most of the time, but as sympathetic nurse Sally (Melissa Lloyd) tells her new patient, “People find they get used to the dark pretty fast.” While recuperating, Jugg thinks fondly of Julia, hoping they might be able to make a go of it someday, but she fails to respond to his letters. Dr. Burns (a top-billed Julian Sands), meanwhile, often emerges from dark corners or peers furtively through windows, displaying an interest in Jugg that seems more patriarchal or predatory than compassionate. Add chronic insomnia and ever-present spiders (which may or may not exist), and the impression eventually sets in that the doctor-patient relationship at the center of this atmospheric BBC production won't end well (it doesn't). Adapted and directed by Chris Durlacher, The Haunted Airman should appeal to fans of Pattinson and Sands, who are both quite good, and to readers of horror master Patrick McGrath (Spider, Asylum, The Grotesque), whose work covers similar psychic (and psychotic) terrain. Recommended. (K. Fennessy)