Creepy Woman Can’t Sustain Her Scares
Four years ago, young lawyer Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) wife died in childbirth, leaving him both heartbroken and with a child, Joseph (Misha Handley) to take care of. On the verge of being sacked by his law firm, the still grieving father is given one last chance to prove himself, his employers sending him to a small countryside town of Crythin Gifford to deal with the secluded estate of a mysterious recluse.
Daniel Radcliffe in The Woman in Black © CBS Films
No one wants him there, only Mr. Daily (Ciarán Hinds), Crythin Gifford’s wealthiest inhabitant, showing him a bit of friendly kindness. Arthur is in fact invited to dinner with him and his wife, Mrs. Daily (Albert Nobbs Oscar nominee Janet McTeer), their meal interrupted by a surreal moment where the woman appears to go into a trance and starts madly scribbling chaotic images into the dining room table with a silver knife.
What is with all of this freakiness? Why are the citizens of Crythin Gifford so eager to see the lawyer depart? And, most importantly, where are all the children, so many of the parents grieving for lost little ones apparently taken from them in a series of random violent accidents few want to speak about and even less want to try and explain. The secret must be buried somewhere on that secluded dilapidated estate, and Arthur Kipps must uncover it by the weekend before Joseph arrives on the evening train eager to be reunited with his father.
Based on the acclaimed novel by Susan Hill, itself already given treatments on both the theatrical stage and by the BBC for television, The Woman in Black is a nastily creepy ghost story that for the majority of its running time offers up palpable amounts of suspense that are certifiably spine-tingling. Working from a script by Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, The Debt), director James Watkins (Eden Lake) does a fine job building tension crafting a bit of Victorian era gothic goodness that had me giddily dangling by a thread. Having never read the book, having never seen any of the prior adaptations, I was more than happily spellbound by what was transpiring, eager to see how it would all wrap itself up and whether or not Arthur could key upon answers that wouldn’t put his son Joseph’s life in jeopardy.
That’s the good news. On the other side of the spectrum is the fact that, sadly, Goldman and Watkins don’t quite manage to keep the ball rolling all the way until the end. For the former, from what is up there on the screen I get the feeling that she could never quite figure out a way to conceal the climactic twists and turns in a way that would keep them from being anything other than blandly obvious. As for the latter, as great as I job as he does during the first two-thirds the subtle hand he had put to such good use shockingly disappears, the latter third filled with obvious music cues, blatant shock-scare gags and lazy visual allusions that simply do not pass muster.
Until then, though, The Woman in Black is a total old school kick, and it’s easy to see why the folks at Hammer were so eager to greenlight the film and get it into production. Arthur’s early steps into Crythin Gifford are just about perfect, Tim Maurice-Jones’ (Snatch) elegant camerawork and Kave Quinn’s (Harry Brown) eerily astute production design helping Watkins cast a gloriously uncomforting spell I couldn’t get enough of. The film in many ways recalls classics like The Haunting, The Innocents and The Wicker Man (the original, not Nic Cage in a bear suit), with healthy helpings of modern Japanese horror like Ju-On thrown in for good measure.
I can’t say that Radcliffe proves he has chops beyond the world of Harry Potter, but he doesn’t do anything to make me believe he does not, either. Like Roddy McDowall in The Legend of Hell House he navigates this world rather nicely, and even if he doesn’t rise to say the same glorious heights as Nicole Kidman did in the rather (much too) similar The Others that doesn’t mean for a moment he does a poor job in the role. The young actor fits the characters quite nicely, and although he’s not as far removed from the Boy who Lived as he probably should be as his first post Hogwarts cinematic experience he’s fairly spot-on.
If only the denouement wasn’t so forgone, didn’t revel in familiarity and telegraph its scares like a second-rate John Carpenter B-movie. I was more than ready to extoll the virtues of The Woman in Black, to scream its praises from the marshy moors. But because of that soggy climax I just can’t do it, and even if there are more than enough plusses for me to give the picture a minor recommendation they’re just aren’t enough of them to warrant the price of a ticket, potential viewers better served to wait for DVD and Blu-ray when they can snap it up as a rental instead.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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