“Every word of what I'm going to tell you is true; I'm just telling it in a different way,” says a character in Skolimowski's eerie fantasy of power and desire set amid the polite English countryside, based on a short story by Robert Graves (I, Claudius). Heading to the insane asylum grounds for a nice game of cricket, an author (Tim Curry, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) finds himself keeping score with a madman (Alan Bates, delightfully hammy), who tells a peculiar tale. A young couple (John Hurt, Susannah York) find their dull existence torn asunder by a wide-eyed drifter (Bates), who both spooks and intrigues them with tales from the Australian outback and his own professed knowledge of various dark arts, including seduction (which he quickly uses on the wife) and a murderous, deadly “shout.” Masculine panic and middle-class paranoia scream from all sides, kept razor-sharp by a fantastic electronic-music score, a powerhouse cast, and Skolimowski's skillful weaving of the mythic, the mad, and the real.