TV REVIEWS : ‘They’: A Gossamer Thread of Emotion

Director John Korty, working from a painfully personal short story by Rudyard Kipling, has managed to film what appears to be almost unfilmable, certainly for television: “They,” a mystery/fantasy about the spiritual reconciliation between a guilty, grieving father and his 11-year-old daughter following the tragic effects of her death in a car accident.

Although Korty, producer Bridget Terry and scenarist Edithe Swensen create a distinctly stylized, gossamer world on an old plantation in the deep South, it is worth noting that their source material is Kipling’s attempt to cope with his inexplicable guilt when his own daughter caught pneumonia and died while the family was on a book promotion tour in New York in 1899.

Patrick Bergin’s workaholic father, unable to communicate love for his daughter when she’s alive, pursues her vision to an old mansion in the South Carolina countryside, where he encounters a strange, blind lady (Vanessa Redgrave) with connections to the spiritual world.

That Bergin and Redgrave pull off their roles without turning the movie into a forlorn and exploitable-looking thriller is testament to the movie makers’ skills. Airing today at 12:05 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Showtime, the production is not without its numbing excesses, but it’s rather startling as a TV movie because, far from being a conventional mystery, it peels away a parent’s love and loss in psychologically inventive terms.