This is a real wild early 70's black sex farce, a look at the philandering that goes on amongst a group of upper crust Britishers with questionable morals. The ultra snooty socialite Lee Remick, married to Ian Holm, is philandering with Richard Attenborough, and Holm starts to fool around with Jennie Linden. When he announces to Remick (who has asked him for a divorce) that he intends to be with Linden, she tells him that he'll never be free of her, obviously intending to keep him at her beck and call for her own little sex games. When she arranges for a double date between all four people, she is oh so gracious, but Linden is disgusted by the whole fake burst of manners. The severe looking psychiatrist Claire Bloom, finding the whole level of games disgusting, finds herself falling for Holm, adding more bizarre twists to this very adult view of the residents of Wonderland.

"I want you savagely, and if I have to I will fight for you savagely", Holm tells Bloom in a key moment after a whole series of wild events have occurred. You need a scorecard to keep track of who is with who, but after a while, you just give up and start to have fun with it. Lee Remick in particular seems to enjoy being deliciously outrageous, and Bloom, initially resembling Lee Grant, eventually starts to look like a disgusted version of Morticia Addams as played by Carolyn Jones.

I too after a while gave up with trying to keep track of what was going on and it began to enjoy this for simply just the wildness of everything and how much fun these characters were having trying to up the other, a few seemingly trying to destroy the others. This takes the drawing room comedy of the 1930's and gives it a very adult 70's twist. You know that none of these people are really going to end up happy, so waiting for that moral fall to occur becomes delightfully grim. Whatever the title actually refers to becomes a strange metaphor as quoted by Bloom who steals every moment she's on screen by being the moral judge at one moment then an unwilling but eager participant the next.

This is a mystery not a comedy.How can the film makers make such a mess of anything written by Irish Murdoch and J.B.Priestley.If that wasn't bad enough to lumber it with such a dreadful title.No wonder the distributors put this on the shelf for a couple of years.Shameful waste of all the talent involved.No doubt Blooms top less scene was included to boost the box office.

As previous reviewers have noted, this is not a horror film, but a comedy based on an Iris Murdoch novel. Curiously, what should have been pitched at a farcical level comes across flat and the humor, such as it is, very British and very dry. Murdoch's novel itself reads as a near-farce, tongue in cheek, without a demand from the reader to suspend disbelief, but to go along for the ride. The portentousness of the "severed head" comment and the perverse exotic erotic goings on of Honor Klein (Claire Blooms in the film--and she does look like a Modigliani!)--all read like symbolic trappings intended to indicate some deeper meaning (it ain't there.) The film comes across restrained, if not nearly constipated, thanks mainly to Ian Holm's performance. His character, our triply-cuckolded protagonist, is frankly a quite unsympathetic character, really a nasty little man throughout. In fact, it is difficult to work up much feeling for any of these characters. Formally, this is just this side of a filmed stage play (scripters Priestly and Murdoch having adapted screenplay from a stage play),it plays like it, and makes it a mediocre film experience. Having said all that, there is something , or there are some things that keep it going on the DVD player: Lee Remick is actually trying to do farce, which is whatis called for, while Claire Bloom is intriguingly exotic and erotic(a creation of Murdoch's. If you're somewhat anglophilic, you'll probably enjoy this, trailing its clouds of "swinging sixties London" glory behind it, a kind of last gasp I suppose.