A psychologist slowly draws out the emotional demons tormenting a quiet 17-year-old boy responsible for a series of savage attacks on horses near his Hampshire home, and is shocked to learn the reasons for his patient's violent behaviour. Drama, starring Richard Burton, Peter Firth, Colin Blakely and Joan Plowright.

A psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, investigates the savage blinding of six horses with a metal spike in a stable in Hampshire, England. The atrocity was committed by an unassuming seventeen-year-old stable boy named Alan Strang, the only son of an opinionated but inwardly-timid father and a genteel, religious mother. As Dysart exposes the truths behind the boy's demons, he finds himself face-to-face with his own.