Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965)

An American woman, just arrived in London, goes to pick up her daughter from her first day at a kindergarten to discover she's missing and in time-tested psychological thriller fashion, everyone seems wilfully reluctant to help or even acknowledge her distress. Laurence Olivier comes in as an arch police superintendent to investigate the case, and is soon developing doubts about the existence of the girl in the face of the mother's womanly hysterics.
If the premise sounds familiar, it's been used in recent years in The Forgotten and Flightplan, to name two. Bunny Lake Is Missing is substantially superior to either, by virtue of a great supporting cast of creepy eccentrics, Noel Coward's unctuous pervert landlord the stand-out turn of the lot, and smart dialogue distributed amongst them all. A pity, then, that the finale feels so out of kilter: the twist is wholly illogical in terms of characters established so far and its camp execution a badly dated mark of modish '60s far-outness.

6/10