However, to one’s surprise, The Appointment picks up and, before one knows it, one becomes absorbed in its atmosphere. Lindsay Vickers composes long shots creeping around the house and then returns to the bedroom where, with genuine eerieness, a character in one of the photos momentarily moves and the red petals of flowers in a vase fall. The scene then appears to cut to the next day with Edward Woodward on the road to London where he is suddenly forced to skid off the road as dogs leap onto the car – but then, in what manages to be a considerable shock for the use of such a cliche device, he wakes up and this only turns out to be a dream. Outside a pack of dogs circle and enter the house, although when Woodward gets up there is nothing there. Everything is accompanied by unworldly atonal score. This is a remarkably well sustained piece of atmosphere that hovers uneasily between dream and waking and leaves one never sure where they are.

When the journey itself starts the next day, Lindsay Vickers starts to get into his Don’t Look Now games of synchronicity and overlapping symbolism – Edward Woodward’s rental car is slow in starting and when it finally does his own car, which has been left behind in the repair shop also starts up, killing the mechanic underneath it (resulting in the ultra-weird image of blood spurting up through the vehicle’s hood). A truck with dogs painted on the side follows Woodward and causes him to crash – the attacking dogs of his dream. The crash itself is a remarkable piece of shooting and editing. It is no mere Hollywood slow-motion fall off a cliff-edge and explosion into flames – the skidding is filmed from every angle including down at tire level, while inside one sees in slow-motion apples splattering against the window, Woodward’s briefcase and coat going sailing, and the extraordinary image of the car teetering up in the air balanced on its front tip on the very edge of the cliff for a long moment before falling over.

The coda, which shows the teenage daughter Samantha Weysom feeding the dogs behind an iron grille in the same copse where the first schoolgirl was snatched, even further heightens the puzzling enigma – What does it mean? Are these the dream-world playmates her mother refers to? Did the dogs snatch the schoolgirl at the beginning? Do the dogs do her supernatural bidding? Such wilful enigma proves fascinating.