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Daniel Radcliffe sneaks round a haunted house in the creepy but not haunting The Woman in Black |
Director: James Watkins
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe (Arthur Kipps), Ciarán Hinds (Sam
Daily), Janet McTeer (Elizabeth Daily), Liz White (Jennet Humfyre), Roger Allam
(Mr Bentley), Tim McMullan (Jerome), Jessica Raine (Joseph’s nanny), Shaun
Dooley (Fisher), Mary Stockley (Mrs Fisher), David Burke (PC Collins)
Susan Hill’s 1983 novel is a favourite modern ghost story –
not surprising then, after a stage adaptation has been packing them in in the
West End since 1987, that it hit cinema screens. Arthur Kipps (Daniel
Radcliffe) is a widowed solicitor whose wife died giving birth to their son
(now four years old). He is sent to an abandoned house in the countryside to review
documents before the property is sold. The villagers nearby are hostile and
wish him to leave. At the house he hears strange noises and sees a woman in
black starring at him. Gradually the horrific nature of the house, and the
curse on it, becomes clear.
The Woman in Black
is an effective and atmospheric scare-a-thon. It feels very creepy, it looks
pretty good, it makes very good use of the sort of inherent terrifying
nastiness you find in porcelain dolls, music boxes, creaking chairs, chintzy
wall-paper and the wind whistling through the trees. It carries a lovely air of
foreboding, and the shots (where we get them) of the woman in black herself
carry a great feeling of menace and maliciousness.
What is just as good though is its slim running time,
because, effective as its jumps are, they are all structured in the same way. We get the haunted house late at
night. We get Daniel Radcliffe walking round it slowly, breathing heavily, the
camera carefully following him. We get slow camera movements around rooms until
they begin to rest on an object or something appears in the corner of a frame.
And then we get a crash of music and something flashes in front of the camera
briefly. It’s a standard “boo” haunted house technique. Sure it’s very well
pulled off indeed, and works great when it’s happening, but it’s a basic trick,
using a sudden noise and distracting movement.
Its good craftsmanship to make the same surprise (basically)
constantly startling – but it’s like being on a rollercoaster. You can see each
dip coming time and time again. You know exactly
what’s going to happen, that you going to be plummeted down. And then when it
happens you still have the adrenaline, driving your fear. But will you be
scared after the rollercoaster has finished? Nope.
That’s where the film’s sort of horror fails. There is
nothing really lingering about this. Even when watching it late at night (as I
did) it didn’t leave me unsettled five minutes after it finished. Effective
horror films – The Shining – leave us
with images and ideas that haunt us for years to come. This one barely lasts
seconds. Compare it too, say, Blink, the
classic Doctor Who episode. This
comes up distant second-best. That works because it has a simple but brilliant
idea (statues move!) and it has a brilliantly simple-but-very-hard-to-do way to
avoid getting caught (don’t blink!). This just has things jump out at you. All
the time.
This film is twice as long but has half the scares and dread
of that. But all the film-makers can really think to do with this idea of a
child-killing ghost is turn it into a “boo” monster. Charles Dickens’ The Signalman uses a premonition ghost
like this to ominous effect – the ghost appears, that’s it. That’s all the
haunting you need. Do you need the ghost moving around a house jumping out at
Radcliffe? Nope. You start to feel the film-makers couldn’t think how to really
extend this idea to fill a film (even one as short as 90 minutes), so needed to
pad it out with no less than two
extended sequences of Radcliffe creeping round a haunted house, sweating.
In the lead Daniel Radcliffe does his best but, to my eyes,
seems hopelessly miscast. For starters he is manifestly far too young to be playing the father of a four-year-old
child. Secondly, Arthur Kipps’ emotional trauma and depression seem to be just
out of Radcliffe’s range – I’m not sure that Radcliffe is quite the actor I
think of for world-weary misery. Now he does a decent job, but he neither looks
nor feels quite right for the part.
The Woman in Black
is a B-movie done rather well, but a B-movie and nothing more. It exists to
spook you and to make you jump. But, if it aspires to anything else, it never
achieves it. As soon as it is finished you’ll never feel a need to see it again
– and nothing from it will stick with you even an hour later. It’s a good
atmosphere piece, but that’s really all it is. It’s as far from giving you a
sleepless night as it could get.
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