Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Olivia Coleman, Vanessa Redgrave, Emily Beecham, Antonia Clarke, Alexandra Roach, Steven Mackintosh, Tom Goodman-Hill, Jacqueline Davis, Lizzie Hopley, Michael Jibson, Adam Long, Madeleine Power, Robert Pugh, Sophie Turner, Gordon Winter.

There are ghost stories and then there are those that play that little bit extra on the mind. They seep through the sub-conscious and get into your dreams during the night and play havoc with your waking hours. Even when the ghost is revealed, it still gets in to your head.

Such is the power of the television adaptation of The Thirteenth Tale, taken from Diane Setterfield’s acclaimed novel of the same name, that even the most seemingly innocuous of moments spring forth and take the viewer down a trip not many of them wold like to venture for themselves.

When Margaret Lea is invited to interview the writer and terminally ill Vida Winter at her home, it sets of chain of events that eventually brings out a the dark terrible secret that has been haunting her life and that of the novelist. The setting of a comfortable manor house polarising the writer’s childhood with her sister and the emptiness, the insanity that spread through the family tree. It is this opposite effect that worked so well in the adaptation, the freshness of youth marred by the inhospitable and seemingly lonely and the homely, full of attention and comfort that is quickly followed by the writer’s wolf, eager to finally finishing off the host that has incubated the terrible disease for so long.

Whilst films for so long have taken the suspense and horror to even greater heights, there are times when what is needed is just the ability to see a drama unfold in which those things that have driven us to be who we are come out in the open, the psychology of the human brain is infinitely more interesting that blood and gore every second of 120 minute film.

With some very powerful performances from Olivia Coleman, the exceptional Vanessa Redgrave, Alexandra Roach, Tom Goodman-Hill and the ever reliable Robert Pugh, The Thirteenth Tale was a story worth delving into and the only complaint would be to having had to wait for the period between Christmas and New Year to have it screened when it surely would have been more appetising as a Halloween treat.

Ian D. Hall