The Queen of Spades

Films can be good and bad; only a few offer magic. Theodore Roszak’s 1991 novel Flicker is about a film-maker whose connection to the black arts allows him to put subliminal messages in his films that make them hypnotic; it’s yet to be filmed. But some movies, from Last Year in Marienbad to Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and Celine and Julie Go Boating just have that unmistakable something, an inexplicable quality that makes the film feel like something more than what’s on-screen.

The Queen of Spaces is such a film. There’s been a few brilliant horror films adapted from work by great Russian writers; Thorold Dickinson’s Alexander Pushkin adaptation has a sense of dread that chills the bones. Anton Walbrook is the manipulative Captain Suvorin who seeks the secret of a elderly countess (Edith Evans); she’s reputed to be a witch, who has sold her soul to the devil to discover how to win every card game she plays.

But at what price? Suvorin’s first mistake is to seduce the Countess’s ward to get closer to her; once he inveigles his way to the dying countess’s bedside, things are only going to go against him in the cruellest way possible. There’s a touch of the old EC Comics morality here, but stories that come from before cinema was invented (1834) always have a slightly otherworldly quality.

The Queen of Spades is a film believed lost for years, but it’s regained much of its original visual power now on streaming, with disconcerting use of glass and mirrors to create a unique sense of 1806 St Petersburg. Treasured British film stalwart Michael Medwin is also amongst the cast; if you’re tiring of jump-scares and monster masks, The Queen of Spades may well be the best ghost story you’ve never seen.