“I hope you’re not starting to imagine things again,” he says with faux concern, using her supposedly troubled mind as an excuse to bar her from seeing any visitors or leaving the house. He starts removing more objects from around the house and accusing her of hiding them. He gives his wife a precious brooch, only to trick her into thinking she’s lost it.

Funnily enough, the “gaslight” of the title was not the method of manipulation, but a vital clue to its discovery.īergman plays Paula, a young woman whose new husband Gregory (French-American actor Charles Boyer) begins a campaign of abuse against her.

The thriller, which won Bergman an Oscar for Best Actress, was adapted from a 1938 play of the same name by Patrick Hamilton, an English novelist and playwright who also wrote the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. The term refers to a very particular and insidious kind of abuse – the kind where a person is deliberately manipulated into questioning their own sanity. Now, Merriam Webster has chosen it as its word of the year for 2022. “You’re slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.” Seventy-eight years later, the term “ gaslighting” has been used in a published High Court judgement for the first time ever, after a woman’s abusive partner gradually convinced her she had bipolar disorder. You’re not going out of your mind,” a detective tells Ingrid Bergman’s Paula in the climactic moments of the 1944 film Gaslight.

Gaslight movie