Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A single mom is raped by an invisible force. Her psychiatrist believes the experience stems from childhood trauma, while she knows something supernatural is at play.
The Entity is anchored by Barbara Hershey's fearless, committed performance that elevates deeply uncomfortable material into something genuinely powerful. The film's central tension between rational psychiatric explanation and supernatural reality is well-handled in its setup, though the plot meanders in its middle section. Cinematography is competent genre work with some effectively unsettling sequences but nothing visually distinctive. The supernatural rape premise was boldly transgressive for its era, giving it some novelty, though the execution follows fairly standard haunting-film conventions. The ending is the film's weakest point — the attempted scientific trap sequence feels anticlimactic and the resolution is frustratingly inconclusive in an unsatisfying rather than deliberately ambiguous way.