Patrick

To all intents and purposes Patrick is dead to the world. Since his mother and her lover died in a bizarre but unfortunate electrical accident, poor Patrick has been so traumatized, his brain’s just ended up inside and left his body for dead. Patrick’s a good boy. He’s obedient. He doesn’t complain about the hospital food, nor does he make the nurses life tough, but after all, Patrick is as 170 lbs of limp meat hanging off a comatose brain, or has he more powers that we can see?

Kathy Jacquard, (Susan Penhaligon) who has just left her husband and is living alone for the first time in several years, returns to her nursing career at a small rundown hospital where Patrick has been placed in care, for four years since the accident.

The hospital is run by the oddly insensitive Dr Roget (Robert Helpmann) assisted by an intensely conservative Matron Cassidy (Julia Blake). Kathy comes to sense that Patrick has developed strange powers which he uses to influence the lives of those around him.

Kathy, whose solitude mirrors that of Patrick, tries to protect him from Roget and the Matron to whom Patrick appears to be a perfect argument in favor of euthanasia.

Away from the hospital Kathy tries to cope with her independence and loneliness by going about a new way of life. Her estranged husband Ed (Rod Mullimar) makes sincere but bungling efforts to win her back but seems to make only a nuisance of himself.

Suspense builds as Patrick’s powers begin to work. Roget is forced into the state of nervous breakdown and Kathy and Patrick face their final confrontation.