A Photograph (1977)

directed by John Glenister
UK
75 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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A single photograph is the catalyst for the events of this installment of Play For Today, but its complexity isn't limited to just the photograph. It opens with a man receiving an unmarked envelope containing an unmarked photograph of two girls sitting in front of a caravan. He doesn't know the girls, he doesn't know the caravan, he doesn't know anybody in the town the envelope was sent from, and neither does his wife. But the photograph drives an already-there wedge between the two even deeper, until eventually "I got this weird photo in the mail today" escalates into "I only ever married you because you were pregnant and then you went and lost the baby".

But like I said, there's more to this than an ugly quarrel. As with a lot of the British made-for-TV movies I've seen, I was surprised at the layers of social critique that are nowhere to be found in the American television I watch. There's an underlying theme of how mentally ill women are socially stigmatized and how they perceive themselves, which was very interesting because it was such a vastly different cultural response to mental illness than I'm used to. 

Certain elements of thinking about mental illness in this film were attitudes that I wish could be transplanted into American society, such as the way it's explicitly understood that mental illness is not a fault in personality but an actual, physical sickness, but some of it was alarming. There's a very gendered feeling of "this isn't who I am", which, to an extent, is also a good thing, because depression does change a person, but it's also tied up in a need to hurry up and rid yourself of your depression as if it was a nasty haircut you had to grow out or a mole you want to have removed. This attitude seems to place a lot of the blame for not getting better fast enough onto the individual and ignores the root causes of unhappiness.

There's also a vibe to this that, like a lot of Play For Today episodes, is extremely subdued but at the same time more unsettling than a whole lot of more on-the-nose horror films out there. Somehow the mystery of the photo is an immediate and threatening thing- the presence of these two completely unknown girls is so obtrusive that they might as well be there in the flesh, staring unblinkingly at the couple, taunting them to figure out their identities. This tone of mystery is preserved throughout the whole thing, even right up to the end when all the loose ends are basically tied up; even when we see who orchestrated it and know the truth behind the girls, there's still a lingering feeling of something having happened that's very not right.