The actor excels as a grieving child psychiatrist drawn to the spine-tingling case of a troubled boy – which is full of haunting visions, blood and supernatural menace

As someone who has always been faintly unsettled by Billy Crystal – if I had been Sally faced with the prospect of getting into Harry’s car for a trip from Chicago to New York, I would have said I would rather walk – it is profoundly relaxing to see him embrace his innately spooky side at last.

He plays child psychiatrist Eli Adler, who is mired in grief after the loss of his wife Lynn (Judith Light) to suicide. He goes to a therapist weekly and refuses to talk about it. He’s in denial, she says. “Of course I’m in denial,” he responds. “Can’t I just enjoy it for now?” Despite the odd moment of clunking exposition, it is a pleasingly sharp script for what is in many ways a horror story, which often does without them. Lynn appears to him in unforgiving visions which suggest deeper secrets between the two of them and around her death than his therapist has any inkling of.