Gaslight (1944)

After her aunt/guardian is murdered in their London home, Paula relocates to Italy. Several years later, she meets and falls for the charming Gregory, who has always dreamed of living in London so, despite her trauma, they move back to her English home together. But Paula becomes forgetful and paranoid -- misplacing items, imagining things, and hearing noises in the closed-off floor above. Her husband is impatient and she's frightened.

Now that the term "gaslighting" has entered into common usage to mean psychological manipulation -- basically denying a person's sane observations -- one can easily guess what's going on here by the title. It's a cruel story that I would've doubted could ever actually work just 20 years ago, but having witnessed the way that so much of the population now simply trusts what Fox News, internet trolls, Trump, podcasts, etc tell them rather than hearing out sources beyond their own bubble, I now know just how accurate this method can be, which makes this even more scary now than it was in the 1940s. Yikes.

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