Cinema: Medium Rare

Seance on a Wet Afternoon. The medium looks like a plump 40-year-old schoolgirl whose face has the form and consistency of unbaked bread. She speaks to her timorous husband in plaintive, halting phrases, pausing from time to time to brush away some imaginary disturbance in the middle of her forehead. "Arthur wants me to be recognized for what I am. What we're doing is not ... wrong, Billy."

Billy dutifully agrees. What they are doing is planning a kidnaping, though his wife prefers to call it "borrowing a child." The idea originated with Arthur, the medium's dead infant son and favorite contact on the Other Side. Once the victim and the ransom money are theirs, the medium can go to the child's parents to divine where both can be found. She will thus be assured of the fame her phenomenal powers deserve, and no harm done.

It is all very mad, very English, and very nearly preposterous. But for viewers eager to empty their minds and concentrate on such creepy business, Writer-Director Bryan Forbes (The L-Shaved Room) works an aura of disaster into every nook and passageway of a turreted old mansion. As the demented psychic, Myra, Kim Stanley manages so many subtle shifts of mood that she seems simultaneously sweet, bitchy, poignant, and a deadly menace. The kidnap scene is a cinematic whirlwind, with the camera cutting and lashing across the landscape to build to a moment of crisis when the victim (Judith Donner) locks herself in the back of a limousine while Billy (Richard At-