The Woman in Black:
****/*****, or 7/10
It seems Hammer Studios is back with a
vengeance. The once grand British motion picture company with its
proud history of producing eerie, creepy and successful horror movies
from the Fifties till the Seventies, more or less disappeared in the
Eighties, but has recently been revived, thanks to Dutch producer
John de Mol. It has now continued its tradition of producing
suspenseful thrillers and horror films, so far with mixed success.
While Let Me In, the English spoken remake of the superb
Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In, proved a
thoughtful and surprisingly restrained movie that respected its
European predecessor, the following voyeur thriller The Resident
was less of a success, maligned by critics and underwhelming
audiences. Hammer now returns to the roots of its former fame, the
Gothic horror film, which in the previous century helped the studio
establish its well earned name as a leading House of Horror in the
film industry – like Universal Pictures used to be in the Thirties
and Fourties – thanks to their classic takes on Dracula and
Frankenstein, not to mention the production of dozens of other
monster movies. Hammer's latest entry in the game, The Woman in
Black, fits in perfectly in its long record of producing quality
horror movies that are based mostly on atmosphere and suspense,
instead of the more typical blood and gore that have become common
place in the genre in the last decade.
And thank heaven for that! With the
success of Saw back in 2004, the horror genre has been
dominated by utter gore fests ever since, driven only by carnage and
splatter to “thrill” its audiences, though few of them were
genuinely scary: it was largely based on the levels of disgust
triggered in spectators than on actually spooking them. And even
though the first Saw featured an ingenious and well crafted
suspenseful plot, none of its many sequels or its numerous copycats,
the likes of Hostel and My
Bloody Valentine, seemed to care about plot too much, but were
driven only by the urge to freak viewers out by showcasing ever more
original and messy ways of cutting victims up, even in 3D. The horror
genre, at least in the USA, seemed to slip into full decline and was
reduced largely to simple 'torture porn'. It took some films from
Japan and Europe, including the aforementioned Let the Right One
In, to demonstrate horror really benefited from a more subtle
approach to things to acquire acclaim and scared audiences. At this
point the genre seems to swing back to the more traditional style of
disturbing people, using suggestion and shadows as its main tactics,
as indicated by the success of the Paranormal Activity series
and recent films like Don't be Afraid of the Dark. Hammer
Studios, once a master of creating tense laden films in this way,
does the right thing to completely ignore the goryness of last
decade's horror films, and continue to do what it did before by
reestablishing the gothic horror movie, as evidenced by The Woman
in Black, directed by James
Watkins, who previously directed the shocking Eden Lake,
an earlier recent exception to the still dominant rule of gore run
horror flicks. Though only his second job in the director's chair,
Eden Lake alone has
established him as fully capable of heading an extremely chilling and
uncomfortable horror movie, so it's perfectly understandable Hammer
felt him to be a right man for directing this particular film.
Set in the Edwardian era, the film
introduces London solicitor Arthur Kipps (played by Daniel
Radcliffe), a young widower who recently lost his wife in childbirth,
leaving him alone with his son, now four years old. Due to financial
problems, Arthur is forced by his law firm to take a case in a small
English village near the coast, handling the estate of a deceased
woman who owned a splendid manor, the Eel Marsh House, on a small
island near the town. Leaving his son behind, with the intention of
him and his nanny joining him on the countryside for the weekend,
Kipps departs. Upon his arrival in the village, Kipps finds out the
locals are less than friendly or welcoming, and would much prefer him
to leave town immediately, which of course he does not. Only the rich
landowner Sam Daily (performed by the always thoroughly reliable and
impeccable Ciaran Hinds), who himself is a bit of an outsider in the
village, proves amicable towards him, having suffered a personal loss
of his own when his son died, which left his wife in a mentally
unhinged state, which she claims is her dead son visiting her. Kipps
journeys to Eel Marsh House, a totally sinister and creepy place
which you would have a hard time believing not to be haunted, but
Kipps doesn't, though he does hear all kinds of eerie sounds and sees
a woman dressed in black staring at him on several occassions. Upon
returning to the town he is confronted with a little girl having
swallowed lye and dying in his arms. He's now met with open
hostility, when it is revealed to him that seeing the woman in black
means local children will commit suicide afterwards, as he just
dramatically witnessed. Still refusing to leave, Kipps stays to
complete his job while investigating the ghostly apparition further.
He discovers the woman in black is the ghost of a mentally unstable
woman who once lived in Eel Marsh House with her son, who was taken
away from her and raised by her sister only to die in her custody,
after which his real mother hung herself. Now she takes other
people's children by manipulating them to their deaths. Mrs. Daily
informs Kipps his son, who will be in town in a short while, is next
and so he convinces himself he must find a way to appease the spirit
somehow before his son is taken by her too.
So there you have it: a more refined
horror story, without any need for overly graphic gutting or
splitting people's bodies revealing their inner anatomy in much more
detail than most sensible people would ever want to see it. The
Woman in Black resorts to the more trite and true ways of
creeping people out, spooking them with effective use of shadows,
eerie sound FX at otherwise quiet moments, illogically moving
furniture and Radcliffe looking generally at ill ease, which he does
well enough considering his still somewhat limited experience in the
field of acting. As a whole, he carries the movie adequately, though
his character seems stupendously naive and Radcliffe himself is
definitely still too young to convincingly pull off a mourning
widower aged around 25 years old. However, his known stardom is not
detracting enough to ever really get into the way of the film's
overall progression. You know him for sure, but you don't care enough
about knowing him from other works to let it fully cloud your viewing
experience. There's hope for Radcliffe's further career yet. He's
obviously no match for the talented Hinds who's proven to be a very
capable actor time and again, most fondly remembered for his role as
Caesar in HBO's TV series Rome. The veteran actor delivers a
more credible and natural performance, but of course he doesn't need
to carry the picture like his younger colleague does. The two of them
work well together (again), and though Hinds is clearly the better
actor he, nor any of the other actors/actresses, doesn't steal the
scenes they share, which would also have felt wrong.
The film's main attraction, aside from
the expected and effective scares of course, lies in its visuals. The
movie feels like a genuine period piece set in the early 1900s, with
delicious costume and art design to match, as well as a wonderful old
Rolls Royce car thrown in to make it feel even more authentic. The
misty, murky environment of Eel Marsh already has a nightmarish feel
to it, which is only completed by the abandoned and decaying Gothic
mansion and its plethora of insufficiently lit nooks and crannies,
ancient furniture, dark corridors and stately rooms, and a large
collection of incredibly unsettling toys no parent in their right
mind would ever let near their kid. Watkins uses this brooding
atmosphere to great effect with simple ideas like chairs seemingly
moving on their own accord, toys playing by themselves and a
distorted woman's face just randomly appearing here and there. Of
course such tricks have been text book scary scenarios for many
decades (also thanks to Hammer Studios), but in this film they work
surprisingly well regardless: it's as it the numbing effect of
watching so much torture porn in the last few years has made us
totally forget said tricks, with The Woman in Black now
re-introducing us to their spooky effect. And in this case it's
really just scares it triggers, instead of actully feeling disgusted,
which is a nice change our bodies will also welcome. The opening
sequence alone, in which three little girls are just playing with
their dolls, only to look off-screen, walk to the window and jump out
together, after which we hear the terrified shrieks of their mother,
without ever leaving the room or seeing the result of the girls'
actions, is enough to make us feel really chilled to the bone instead
of sickened and nauseated through and through: all achieved by a
simple combination of subtle camera work, sound and suggestion.
The Woman in Black is Hammer's
definite return to old school form, showing audiences that the
ancient tricks still work best when applied by a capable director to
truly scary effect. Though the lead actor's performance is not
exactly of the highest quality, it's sufficient to draw you into the
mood the film wants you to be in to frighten you successfully. In
terms of story it may not be the most original work, despite its
ending which is undecidedly happy or in fact the complete opposite,
but it delivers much in terms of atmosphere and completely achieves
what it sets up to do: shock the shit out of you for about ninety
minutes. A welcome reprieve from the overabundance of gore filled
genre films of the last few years, and hopefully it will put the
horror genre back on the right path again.
And I managed to write this whole
review without ever mentioning Harry Potter at all... oh, damn...!
And watch the trailer here:
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