The Grinning Man

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Duration: 2 hours

Jonathan Creek returns, to explain a series of baffling disappearances in a "haunted" room at the house of a master illusionist...

At midnnight on Midsummer's Day 1938, a famous Harvard geneticist, Eli Mencken, accepts a challenge to spend the night inside a gloomy old attic room... where the ghost of a madman is said to prey upon human flesh. Next morning, he has impossibly vanished from the hermetically sealed chamber. The only clue to his disappearance is traces of grisly ectoplasm on the bed.

Seventy years on, the vast Gothic house known as Metropolis has passed into the hands of the original owner's daughter and her son, but the strange, unexplained events in "The Nightmare Room" continue...

When two young women take shelter there one night from a raging thunderstorm, it is not long before the ominius "presence" has claimed another victim.

Determined to get to the truth about what has happened to her friend, the fearlessly sceptical Joey Ross finds herself working alongside veteran lateral thinker Jonathan Creek, as together they embark on a complex, often dangerous, investigation into a mystery which only continues to deepen...

Who is behind the ingenious abduction of magician Lance Gessler's beautiful young assistant Elodie?

What secrets lie buried in the tomb of Gessler's sinister grandfather, the once-renowned spiritualist and psychic, Jacques Futrelle?

And above all, what strange unholy power resides in the grotesque old portrait of a grinning man that hangs on the attic wall?

Can Jonathan Creek once again shed light on the riddle and render the impossible possible? Or are his once formidable powers of deduction about to be eclipsed this time, by the sheer raw intuition of his younger counterpart...?

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    A sceptical Joey finds herself working with lateral thinker Jonathan Creek to try and solve the disappearance of Elodie.

Credits

Jonathan Creek
Alan Davies
Joey
Sheridan Smith
Jacques Futrelle
Jon Campling
Eli Mencken
Patrick Poletti
Adam Klaus
Stuart Milligan
Housewife
Sally Plumb
Alec
Adam James
Mina
Naomi Bentley
Glenn
Ciaran McMenamin
Nicola
Katherine Parkinson
Elodie
Jenna Harrison
Lance Gessler
Nicholas Boulton
Constance Gessler
Judy Parfitt
Candy Mountains
Jemma Walker
Delia Gunning
Ellen Ashley
Child Constance
Eloise Rakic-Platt
Lenny
Nick Nevern
Young Constance
Charlotte Corner
Maitre D'
Graham Vanas
Puppini Sisters
Kate Mullins
Puppini Sisters
Marcella Puppini
Puppini Sisters
Stephanie OBrian
Narrator
Andrew Havill
Director
David Renwick
Producer
Nerys Evans

Broadcasts

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Available on: DVD

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