This is a totally off-centre and weirdly compelling horror-tinged psycho-drama that sees Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora, a penniless prostitute still mourning the death of her daughter many years previously. She becomes acquainted with a strange, unstable, waif-like girl called Cenci (Mia Farrow) who bears a striking resemblance to her dead daughter. Strangely Leonora also bears a close resemblance to Cenci's dead mother. The two women develop an unusual relationship, living in a semi-fantasy in Cenci's massive Victorian gothic mansion. Relationship's become increasingly complicated and fractured when Cenci's incestuous stepfather Albert (Robert Mitchum) turns up.
In "Secret Ceremony" director Joseph Losey created a slightly incoherent and muddled but hugely unsettling and evocative drama. The atmosphere of the film drips with madness and strange religious allusions with Losey heightening these effects with clever wide-angled camera work and strangely contrived angles and shots. The eerie Victorian mansion where most of the story happens adds to the spooky, unhinged feel. It is sumptuously decorated and dressed with dark brooding rooms and strange art-nouveaux designs and furnishings giving a strangely incoherent and fractured look that echoes Leonora and Cenci's mental state. Mia Farrow is wonderfully unhinged throughout the film and it is never clear what her motivations are or whether she has simply sunk into outright madness. Elizabeth Taylor is absolutely first class delivering a haunted portrayal of an emotionally fraught woman drowning in grief and looking to clutch onto any form of stability. Overall "Secret Ceremony" has a tendency to incoherence and without a doubt there is more than a whiff of pretention, but despite that it still delivers a couple of great acting performances and a persuasively disturbing atmosphere. There is something odd and unique about the film and it leaves a lingering feeling of dread and unease. ( )