AustLit

Set in the colony of New South Wales in the 1830s, this is a woman-centred melodrama set against colonial class divisions and involving two overlapping triangles (husband/wife/outsider and husband/wife/sinister housekeeper). The film is light on suspense but complex in emotional interplay, involving the long take (which precludes strict point of view) in shifting emotional identification intertwined with the guilt of the main characters. Robin Wood has also identified complex intertextual relationships: an early Hitchcock, The Manxman (a class-based triangle); Rebecca (the sinister housekeeper); Vertigo (the role of 'confession' and the reconstruction of the woman's image by the hero); and the stylised psychoanalytical romances Spellbound and Marnie. Along with Notorious and Gaslight, it is central to Ingrid Bergman's canon, in the tension in her persona between the active 'natural' woman and the vulnerable mentally and/or physically debilitated victim. (Source: Libraries Australia)