Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) Bunny Lake is a four-year-old girl, feared abducted from a Hampstead primary school, who may or may not exist. The movie's first and key masterstroke is to leave us in doubt. We haven't met Bunny. When her already tense, rather humourless American mother (underrated Carol Lynley) comes to collect her at teatime on her first day, the staff are baffled, and don't recall any such child. All Bunny's possessions - toys, passport, even her toothbrush - have mysteriously disappeared from the Lakes' new flat. Only Lynley's Ann, and her sports car-driving journalist brother Stephen (Keir Dullea), can attest to a Bunny Lake having ever drawn breath. Keeping that doubt alive is crucial to the film's disorienting vibe, and differentiates it from the likes of a Lady Vanishes, or a (lesser) Flightplan, where we know some kind of conspiracy is afoot. Here, we can only suspect one. Who's to be trusted? Preminger, working from a crafty and succinct screenplay by John and Penelope Mortimer, throws in such a bounty of richly bizarre supporting characters, it's anyone's guess. When your landlord is a self-adoring creep in cable-knit sweaters, who owns a collection of whips and a skull he says belongs to the Marquis de Sade, and is played by Noël Coward at his most glutinous, be afraid. Meanwhile, a pair of Great Expectations character actors are installed in the movie like cherished antiques. Miss Havisham, that's to say Martita Hunt, is now a weird old biddy living in the school attic and quizzing the children about their nightmares. Magwitch, or rather Finlay Currie, has become the chief surgeon at a doll hospital, where the last remaining evidence of Bunny's time upon this earth is perhaps to be found. It's almost by the by that Laurence Olivier is overseeing the police search. Preminger didn't see this as a major movie, but it's a devilish tease, especially next to bloated late-career projects such as Exodus or The Cardinal. It's fairy tale gone noir - an elaborate spin on hide and seek, or blind man's bluff, in which adults regress all the way back to the playground, doing sickening, Norman Batesian things like setting dolls alight. None of us is wholly grown up, and everyone's playing their own pathological little game. Is Bunny, too?