Terence Young’s 1967 thriller Wait Until Dark features one of the most frightening climaxes in movie history. Audrey Hepburn plays Susy, a woman recently blinded in a car accident. Her photographer husband, Sam, unknowingly comes into possession of a doll containing valuable heroin. A group of crooks, led by a man called Roat (Alan Arkin), run a scheme to earn her trust so they can search the couple’s one-bedroom apartment for the doll. Susy slowly starts to catch on, and the film ends with Susy purposefully plunging her apartment into darkness to evade Roat’s knife. If he is going to kill her and take the doll, he must do so with Susy, who is used to navigating the small apartment without the ability to see, having the upper hand.
Wait Until Dark remains one of the finest examples of a limited-setting film, with nearly all of the action in the living room of Susy’s cozy New York City apartment. It should come as no surprise that the film is based on a stage play of the same name by Frederick Knott, who years earlier also wrote the stage play and then later screenplay for another limited-setting classic, Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial ‘M’ For Murder (1954). Knott is lucky in that both movie adaptations bare traces of their original forms, but also mark a sufficient departure from the theatrical to be truly cinematic.
The suspenseful climax hinges on our familiarity with the limited setting. Rather than film the action as if it were a televised play, Young and cinematographer Charles Lang shoot the space in a dynamic way. The camera glimpses nearly every corner of the apartment: closets, drawers, and crawl spaces. They open with Roat’s two cronies, Mike (Richard Crenna) and Carlino (Jack Weston), breaking into the apartment before Susy returns home. This gives the men, and by extension the film’s audience, a chance to truly explore and understand the layout: the sub-basement, open apartment features a kitchen, living room, and a small workspace for Sam. At the end of the apartment is the couple’s bedroom, a bathroom, and a closet. Throughout the film, characters often move throughout the apartment. When they do, the camera goes with them, again giving the audience a chance to further develop their familiarity with the setting from a variety of angles and vantage points.
Hepburn’s performance becomes crucial to the audience’s relationship with the space. Many of the film’s best-known scenes are highly stylized and melodramatic. (For example, once Susy realizes the danger before her, she cowers by the stairs to the apartment holding the doll, as if she were a little girl). But the finest moments come from the subtleties of Hepburn’s performance; certain gestures, like the way she tenderly moves objects throughout the apartment, or the palpable way she feels her way through it via a combination of memory and her own non-visual senses. For her to live in the space, there must be order. Naturally, all of that gives way to chaos, as the men slowly infiltrate the apartment and begin tearing it apart in search of the doll.
Suspenseful movement through the space makes up the core of the climax. Anticipating Roat’s arrival, Susy breaks or removes the lightbulbs from all but one of the lights in the apartment. We have seen the apartment in full light, and now we see it in partial light; our own vision is slowly fading away. Once Roat corners Susy, she pulls the plug on the final light and the two become consumed by the dark. Total darkness becomes the third and final way we experience the apartment. The film lingers in this blackness, leaving only the sounds of the two feeling their way through the space and talking to one another. We begin to experience the closest thing to existing as Susy does in the apartment.
Left only with darkness and a killer on the loose, we start to remember the layout of the apartment and realize just how many times we have seen characters walk around the homey space. We feel the danger and tension. We try to remember each nook and cranny. We wish for the lights to come back on. Looking at the dark screen, we are nowhere and everywhere, suspended. The suspense and terror comes from that space between the known and the unknown – and from inside our own head.
“Wait Until Dark” is streaming on HBO Max and is available for digital rental or purchase.