Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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night is not yet over. Malfred goes to the window and pulls up the blind to let in the
light. Shortly afterwards, there is a sudden noise of glass breaking. At first, the
audience does not see what has caused the noise; there is instead a reaction shot of
Malfred in close-up, seen through a broken pane of glass. Once again, the camera
focuses on an extreme close-up of Malfred’s eyes, but this time, there is an expression
of joy on her face, as if, in a moment of epiphany, she is able to really “see” for the first
time. She picks up a rock, which is black, like the rocks at the beach – presumably the
cause of the broken window. She stares at it and touches it, closing her eyes as though
savouring its reality.
The camera pans away from her to the photo of her and Wilfred, and the audience
realizes that the glass of the photograph has been broken vertically separating her image
from Wilfred’s by the rock thrown through the window. It is significant that in this
moment of epiphany, Malfred’s ties with the past have symbolically been broken. The
camera continues zooming in on the photo to a close-up of her face. The last shot of the
film is of Malfred lying dead on the floor. One possible reading of this image is that she
has finally achieved her goal of being able to see the true nature of the world, but as the
shattered windowpane suggests, the shock of reality has been too much for her to bear.
Alternately, we might interpret the rock as proof that she really has been terrorized by a
prowler. The image is ambiguous but highly evocative. The camera moves in closer,
then tilts up to the window, a powerful image of the border between outside and inside,
civilization and wilderness. The film ends with a freeze-frame of the window.
As in the case of the original novel, the film is so strongly coloured by subjectivity that
the viewer is never entirely sure what is waking reality and what is dream or flashback.
We remain close to Malfred’s viewpoint (while occasionally taking a step outside it, as
in the camera movement that reveals the disconnected telephone cord) and we share in
her delusions - or are they in fact, penetrating insights into reality (like Kurtz’s “The
horror! The horror!” at the climax of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness)? 414 Ward
later commented, he wished he had held the final shot of the film longer. He added: “A
rock that appears seemingly from nowhere near the end, also figured in a classroom shot
414
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer: The Complete Texts, ed. Franklin Walker
(New York: Bantam Books, 1969) 131.