Whether this was regarded as a prequel to The Innocents or not, I don't think it was a good film. I simply don't regard the children's motives for killing Peter Quint and Miss Jessel to be believable. I can accept that they witnessed the rough sex between the two and somehow tried to reenact what they saw and believed to be "sex" - to the horror of Mrs. Grose the housekeeper. I can also accept that their close relationships with Quint and Jessel led them to mistaken and distorted ideas of love and sex. But in the film, we are asked to believe that the children killed them just because they thought they were "in love" and so wanted them to be "together" - and Quint earlier had made the rather random remarks that sometimes if you love someone you have to kill him/her, and that you could be with dead people only if you yourself are dead. To be brief, the children actually wished them well and thought they were doing "good" by killing them. If in real life some children commit murder for those reasons, I would not call them naïve but rather retarded. The film was meant to be the backstory for the deaths of Quint and Miss Jessel and set up the initial situation for The Innocents, but that story was unbelievable and close to preposterous.
It did not help that that the children were way too old to be that "innocent". Pamela Franklin that played Flora in The Innocents was only 11 but the girl in this film was 19. In The Innocents, the deaths of Quint and Miss Jessel were meant to be mysteries. Based on this film, I am not sure how they could explain away their deaths when Miss Jessel was found drowned with a hole at the bottom of her boat, and Quint with two arrows through his body. Wasn't it clear that Miles was the obvious suspect for Quint's murder since he almost shot Mrs. Grose earlier?
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