But even though I knew all along, it was still hard to spot exactly how he was pulling some of his tricks off, planting evidence on her person or stealing it out of her room without Paula (or us) catching him. It may be because I’m familiar with Gaslight’s premise, but I knew right from the start that Anton was pulling a fast one on Paula. Finally things get to the point where he even contradict’s Paula’s memory of the letter from Sergis Bauer – “you said you were reading a letter, but there was nothing in your hand in the first place!”įortunately, the goings-on at Paula and Anton’s house have attracted the attention of a busybody neighbor and a young detective from Scotland Yard, who suspect something’s up – and as Anton is chipping away at Paula’s sanity, the detective is working to get to the bottom of what’s happening with Paula – and whether it may be connected to her aunt’s murder. He keeps her at home constantly, turning away any visitors on the pretext that she’s sick the isolation makes Paula feel even more unmoored.
When Paula keeps thinking she hears noises from the attic at night, Anton says that’s impossible – is she sure she’s not dreaming? Or hearing things? She’s been getting kind of forgetful lately, maybe something’s wrong with her?…Īnton persistently chips away at Paula’s sense of reality, making her doubt the things she sees, hears, and does, and even her own memory. When Paula can’t find little things around the house that she could swear she’d just put down right there, Anton suggests that she’s been getting kind of forgetful lately. When Paula senses the new maid really doesn’t like her, Anton brushes it off as being all in her head. Anton brushes her concerns off – she’s just overreacting!ĭismissing Paula’s concerns becomes something Anton does a lot.
He tries to laugh off his reaction as “oh, sweetie, I just hate to see you dwelling on icky stuff like that,” but Paula is understandably alarmed. She starts reading it out loud, baffled – and Anton seems unusually freaked out and roars at her to stop. While they’re packing it up, Paula comes across a love letter from someone named Sergis Bauer, written to her aunt two days before her death. In fact, hasn’t Paula inherited her aunt’s old house?….why not live there?Īnton further suggests that they could move all of her aunt’s things into the attic and board up the door so Paula doesn’t have to look at it all the time. Paula dreamily looks forward to a life with Anton in a city like Paris or Vienna – but Anton is strangely insistent on moving back to London. The professor releases gives them his blessing, and the pair quickly tie the knot.
We then jump forward ten years to find Paula quitting her music lessons because she’s fallen in love with the class accompanist, Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer). It’s a chance to start afresh, he tells her. The police kindly lead her past the curious throng waiting outside her aunt’s London townhouse and into a carriage, where the avuncular police captain tells her she’s being taken in by her aunt’s old vocal teacher in Italy. That is, she was – the film opens on the night of her aunt’s murder, after Paula has discovered her body. Just in case – Gaslight is the tale of Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman), who is a teenage girl living with her opera singer aunt at the very top of the film. But those modern associations are why there’s a scene at the end that felt so viscerally satisfying. I’d not ever seen this film before, but knew all about it the term “gaslighting” has become common knowledge in the days of #metoo and Gamergate and jerks being jerks to women online.
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