KINDRED SPIRIT

The week's most adventurous and unusual TV movie is They (Showtime, Nov. 14, 8-9:30 p.m.). At first, They seems like your standard TV-movie weepie-a little girl (Nancy Moore Atchison) is killed in an auto accident, and her parents (Sleeping With the Enemy's Patrick Bergin and Northern Exposure's Valerie Mahaffey) have a difficult time coping with their grief. But very quickly, They moves off into surprising directions. Bergin is a cold, rigid architect who feels guilty that he never told the girl how much he loved her. But then he begins having visions of his daughter in which little Nikki still seems alive. And he meets a blind woman, played by Vanessa Redgrave, who is given to the same sort of paranormal experiences and who convinces him to pursue these visitations. Mahaffey and Redgrave give strong, subtle performances; Bergin, however, is much too blank-faced and unremittingly grim to summon up much sympathy in us. But director John Korty, as he has proven in such TV movies and miniseries as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Long Road Home, and Deadly Matrimony, has a true talent for taking highly emotional material and shaping it into effective drama. Even if you're a scoffing skeptic about the supernatural, you'll probably find yourself drawn in by the agony and ecstasy of They. B+