It starts off like a horror film, or like a modern-day Tennessee Williams piece and then transmutes into ... something very different indeed.

The dialogue raises the odd snigger and the final act is perhaps a little too barmy, but a committed cast and an experienced director make this a tense and effectively claustrophobic experience.

Friedkin's best film in at least two decades.

It might have taken David Cronenberg, that insect fetishist (Naked Lunch, The Fly), to truly turn this into a freak-out session.