When a gang of thieves rock up at a remote shoreline location after stealing a valuable work of art, they realise they’re missing one thief. What has happened to the female one of their number? It’s the first in a series of questions the three men will face over the course of the tense aftermath of their crime. But the action really gets going at around the midpoint of the film, when three mysterious and beautiful women who claim to have been shipwrecked show up. Being gentlemen, the lads decide to offer them a roof over their comely heads for the night.
For all this, the film’s ace card is its location. The pale, low-lying, single-storey house on a shingle beach isn’t your conventional cobwebbed and turreted spooky house – more like quite a nice holiday home – but its isolation and flatness gives a unique sort of strangeness to proceedings. The film is also almost entirely shot during either the first light of the day, the last light of the day, or night-time, which is an effective strategy: the characters feel quite literally shadier and the action unfolds with the off-kilter strangeness of a bad dream.
