Review: 'The Woman in Black'

Who doesn’t love getting scared in the dark auditorium of a movie theatre, pop-corn, and drink in hand? I certainly do, and The Woman in Black, if not exactly destined to become iconic in the genre of “gothic” thrillers, certainly will do for a cold winter evening’s escapist fun.  

The film begins promisingly with a haunting scene of three young girls playing at “high tea” before jumping out the window of their playroom.

• The Woman in Black is one of the movies playing this week at .

The film, based on the 1983 novel by Susan Hill and adapted by Jane Goldman (who recently penning both The Debt and Kick-Ass), and set in a perpetually smoky and fog-bound 19th Century England, has gloom and doom in aces. 

Director James Watkins thoughtfully and imaginatively sustains a mood of impending disaster through relentless, lugubrious lighting. The sun never shines in this corner of the globe. If it’s a very haunted house you’re looking to book on your next trip to England, look no further. 

Talk about “things that go bump in the night”, The Woman in Black provides a veritable encyclopedic compendium of every imaginable cliché and does that very well indeed. Whether this adds up to a satisfying movie-going experience, is another matter. This viewer couldn’t help trying to remember numerous times where’d I seen this or that scene before. It might be asking too much for something truly original in the tried but true, old-fashioned, jump-out-of-your seat fright-night department, but one is eternally hopeful. 

Is there life after Harry Potter for an actor whose name has become synonymous with the titular hero of that mega-million blockbuster franchise? On the basis of his performance here, the answer is YES!  The young star has already proven his chops during a year-long run on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, despite some initial skepticism and mixed notices. 

Here portraying Arthur Kripps, an attorney, still in deep mourning for his wife who died in childbirth after delivering him a son, Radcliffe convincingly maintains the haunted look of someone dealt a blow he cannot comes to term with. It will take more than one adult film role to erase the image of the Hogwarts wizard-in-training etched in our collective movie-going experience, but the actor turns in a nuanced performance.

Kripps is sent by his boss to a remote seaside village to settle the estate of a young woman who has mysteriously died. Leaving his adorable boy with the nanny, he sets out into the moors and mists to a town where every occupant shoos their children inside while shooting menacing looks in his direction.

The estate the young attorney is investigating is located on a remote promontory where daily high-tides make comings and goings nearly impossible.  Best and most spooky is an extended wordless scene where Kripps, alone, explores the nooks and crannies of the massive estate and every water drip and door creak does the job of making your skin crawl.   

Good to see Janet McTeer back to playing a woman after her “manly” turn in and the all British cast suitably induces goose-bumps. In true horror-film fashion, just when all seems finally bright and rosy, a final twist wrenches us from our optimism and provides a tantalizing coda.

Jeff Klayman is an award-winning playwright whose works have been produced in New York, Los Angeles and London. He also wrote the screenplay for the independent film Adios, Ernesto, directed by Mervyn Willis.