Remember how each Harry Potter film was darker and more menacing than the last? Well, The Woman in Black feels like Harry Potter 17. And Harry has no powers.
In his first foray outside of the Potterverse, Daniel Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a lawyer, widowed by childbirth, skating on thin ice at his firm.
From the outset, Woman has all the markings of a typical, slow-burning suspense thriller. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening: in a last ditch attempt to salvage his job, Arthur travels to a foggy village to consolidate a deceased woman's estate. But everything feels wrong—the pacing, score and muted performances conspire to produce an unnamed terror lurking below the surface.
Paralysed with fear, the villagers aren’t keen on Kipp sticking around, but daren’t say why. As Arthur goes about his paperwork in the gloomy, Victorian manor (isolated on an island, to triple the fear factor), he unearths the startling truth about the inhabitant’s history. Soon, a phantom woman in black begins appearing in unlikely places—and children begin perishing in unlikely circumstances.
Director James Watkins knows how to get great scary mileage from the mundane. The first half of the film is a well-crafted work of suggestion—it relies on atmosphere and the creaks and shadows of the mind. He would’ve done well to keep building the tension until a final, satisfying payoff of onscreen terror. He didn’t.
There’s a specific point, midway through, when it becomes clear the director is more interested in making us jolt in our seats than telling his story. Scary has been exchanged for mere startling.
Trapped on an island with a vengeful ghost, Kipp displays great nerve; while any sane person would curse the frigid tides and just swim home, he is obliged to stay. If he doesn’t complete his work, he’ll be out of a job and his family will slip under the poverty line.
But the woman in black has other plans—which apparently are to just jump out and scream at him over and over again in different rooms of the house. It’s very dark, very macabre, and very scary—but not in an admirable, artistic way. It’s more like if I threw sharp objects at your face for an hour. You’d be afraid, but you wouldn’t be impressed.
Not only is the format dull, but the style is old and tired. The Woman in Black recycles a stunningly long list of thriller movie clichés: creepy pallid English children; porcelain dolls; wall messages scrawled in blood; prophetic drawings/paintings/photographs; phantom whisperings down the hall; faces appearing in mirrors; wary animals with a sixth sense; ghosts with ‘unfinished business’ etc.
If you’re not a fan of thrillers/horror/ghost stories, this film will be difficult to endure, let alone enjoy. If you are a ghoul aficionado, you’ll likely find The Woman in Black completely bereft of originality.
Radcliffe himself does well not to overdo his terror, and is aided by solid performances from seasoned veterans like Ciaràn Hinds and Roger Allam. How any of them were attracted to this project is the biggest mystery of all.
