David Wontner

Keyhole is a rousing 1930's gangster picture set in a haunted house. It is a ghost sonata in which dream and waking life are seamlessly blended to isolate and expose universal feelings. A gangster and deadbeat father, Ulysses Pick, returns home after a long absence. He is toting two teenagers: a drowned girl, Denny, who has mysteriously returned to life; and a bound-and-gagged hostage, who is actually his own teenage son, Manners. Confused, Ulysses doesn't recognize his own son, but he feels with increasing conviction he must make an indoor odyssey from the back door of his home all the way up, one room at a time, to the marriage bedroom where his wife Hyacinth awaits, full of cancer, grieving over the deaths of her three children, and wooed by Ulysses' arch-rival, Chang. The house is haunted by countless dead relatives. Ulysses eventually reaches his goal and vanquishes his enemy, but the equilibrium of the house has been disturbed. Perhaps this has all been a dream that is dreamt every night by Manners himself or by the ghosts he loves so much.