Somewhere inside this antiseptic and neutered thriller, there’s a full-blooded horror film lurking in the shadows, but helmer Christian, responsible for production design on films like Mahler (1974; dir. Ken Russell) or Alien (1979; dir. Ridley Scott), is more interested in staging flashy and obvious nightmare sequences that, thanks to the eponymous telepath’s dubious powers, are actually figments of their experient’s imagination. In this essence, the film is far too safe to be menacing or urgent, which ‘thrillers’ by definition undoubtedly aim to be, as no-one actually gets hurt, despite all the hallucinated beheadings and electrocutions.

But even these are botched by Christian – in that they lack the necessary technical joie de vivre that raises superfluous material above its logical (and therefore aggressively inhibiting) container narrative. The classic example of this is the famous attack-by-crop-duster in North by Northwest (1959; Alfred Hitchcock), but sequences in Vargtimmen (1968; dir. Ingmar Bergman) and Malpertuis (1971; dir. Harry Kümel) are more closely related to Christian’s efforts, and show, in their blending of reality and illusion with genuine suspense, what he could have – and should have – achieved given the resources and talent available to him.

The Sender at the IMDb