Mackendrick introduced a new strain of realism into his films with this moving story of a deaf child whose refusal to reach outside her cocoon of silence traumatizes her middle-class parents and threatens to destroy their unstable relationship. The first in Mackendrick's trilogy about precocious and destructive children, Mandy is an absolutely fascinating melding of The Miracle Worker's semi-documentary theater and Brief Encounter's fractured and intensely first person melodrama of marital dissatisfaction.