Twisted Nerve is a 1968 British psychological thriller film directed by Roy Boulting and starring Hywel Bennett, Hayley Mills, Billie Whitelaw and Frank Finlay.
[3][2] The film follows a disturbed young man, Martin, who pretends, under the name of Georgie, to be intellectually impaired in order to be near Susan, a girl with whom he has become infatuated.
[4][5] Martin plays catch with his older brother Pete, who has learning difficulties and has been sent to live in a special boarding school in London, by their mother.
Now disbelieving in a link between them, the manager asks Susan for her address, and Martin makes a mental note when she offers it.
Martin returns home and finds his parents arguing in the parlour, over his lack of interest in life, his unusual behaviour and the duck incident.
[8] The title comes from the poem Slaves by George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962) which is quoted twice in the movie, once during Professor Fuller's lecture on chromosome damage, and then as an audio flashback when Martin/Georgie is in a cell: Viereck's motives for his writing have been the subject of some discussion, and have further implications given the debate on eugenics during the middle of the 20th century, a subject somewhat alluded to in Professor Fuller's lecture in the film.
[11][12] The theme can also be heard in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill when a menacing Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) impersonates a nurse in the hospital scene and in Death Proof as Rosario Dawson's character's ringtone, in several episodes of American Horror Story (2011–2021), in the Malayalam language Indian movie Chappa Kurishu as a ringtone of Fahad Fazil's character's iPhone, and in the Bengali movie Chotushkone where it is also used as a ringtone for Parambrata Chatterjee's character's phone.
[13] Stylotone Records reissued the score as part of a deluxe LP set, with a release date of 5 May 2016.
Letters of complaint were sent to the British censor before the film's release, including one from the National Association for Mental Health.
"[17] As The New York Times put it, "this is a delicate area indeed", going on to describe the film as "more unsettling than rewarding, and certainly more contrived than compassionate".
The Boultings may have set out to make a serious comment on the plight of the mentally disordered, but what they have produced is a crudely sensationalist thriller decked out with some pseudoscientific jargon which suggests, intentionally or not, that the siblings of mongoloid children are likely to end up as homicidal maniacs.
But even viewed as a straightforward thriller, the film is so clumsily and predictably put together (witness the rash of timely coincidences in the climactic sequence) that the insurance company which has offered to pay out to the dependents of anyone dying of shock while watching it is hardly likely to find any clients.
Billie Whitelaw (as the landlady) and Barry Foster (as a seedy film salesman decrying the trend towards sex and violence in the cinema, no less) apart, the performances are unremarkable: Hywel Bennett is baby-faced enough to make his childlike persona moderately convincing but can't manage the rest; and Hayley Mills shuffles through it all on a high-pitched monotone trying hard to look adult and concerned.
"[20] The Observer called it "a glossy commercial psycho thriller which if it weren't for its pernicious implications would be perfectly horrifying" arguing the film would have been better had the character of the elder brother never existed.
"Twisted Nerve is a fairly good blood chiller in its genre so long as it is clearly understood that it is a pack of lies.