A serial killer known as ‘The Avenger’, who has a taste for young blondes, is terrorising London. A man arrives at the house of Mr and Mrs Bunting (their daughter, Daisy the blonde model, fits the bill for the next victim perfectly) one foggy night seeking tenancy. Reclusive and secretive, the new tenant goes missing whenever the killer strikes, his heavy footsteps thumping across the floor puncture the silence of the house. This leaves the obvious question: is he or isn't he? Described by the director as ‘the first true Hitchcock film’, The Lodger has all the ingredients to concoct a gripping Hitchcockian thriller – mistaken identities, sex and murders – the handbag bursting at the seams with secrets that reappears in Marnie (1964); the conversation through the bathroom door that lingers as a harbinger to the famous shower scene in Psycho (1960); the same long, echoing corridor that the characters in Suspicion (1957) walk down; the discovery of a woman’s body by the banks of the Thames, which recalls the opening of Frenzy (1972). Hitchcock turns the matinee idol Ivor Novello into a murder suspect, conspiring against the studio’s publicity machine and blurring the line between the guilty and the innocent to provoke the audience’s imagination and keep them on the edge of their seats.

*Post-screening talk with Thomas Shin, in Cantonese