Séance on a Wet Afternoon is a 1964 British crime thriller film, directed by Bryan Forbes, and starring Kim Stanley, Richard Attenborough, Nanette Newman, Mark Eden and Patrick Magee.

[2] Based on the 1961 novel by Mark McShane, the film follows a mentally unstable medium who convinces her husband to kidnap a child so she can help the police solve the crime and achieve renown for her abilities.

According to Jon Krampner's biography Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley, Forbes and Attenborough initially had encountered difficulty in casting the role of Myra.

[citation needed] Forbes and Attenborough then contacted Kim Stanley, an American theatre and television actress whose previous film work was limited to starring in the 1958 feature The Goddess and providing the uncredited opening and closing narration for the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In fact he does an excellent job, and no doubt the perfectly modulated acting (no hysteria, no Look It's My Mad Scene) is largely due to his sympathetic handling of the actors: but there are flaws which indicate an uncertainty of level. ...

The atmosphere is beautifully furthered by the décor – the hideously oppressive living-room, the ancient gramophone scratchily playing a haunting Mendelssohn song, the glaring whiteness of the bedroom disguised as a hospital, the polished gloom of the seance chamber, the discreetly overgrown garden. ...

Still, it isn't often that the British cinema offers a thriller which is so consistently intelligent and exciting; which contains one genuinely superb performance (Kim Stanley) likely to figure in many a ten-best list, and another (Attenborough) almost as good; and which provides dialogue which unerringly illuminates the dangerous areas between private fantasy and public madness.