The Woman in Black

As the first film to be released by the British horror-film-specialist production company Hammer Film Productions since their recent resurrection, and as Daniel Radcliffe's first post-Potter movie, James Watkins' new horror The Woman in Black, an adaptation of Susan Hill's acclaimed ghost story, marks a new beginning in multiple senses. But does it show promise for the futures of both Hammer and Radcliffe?

The very first scene, where three children playing with their toy dolls suddenly stop as if in a trance before throwing themselves out of a window, certainly suggests that Hammer's return is something to get excited about. The scene is both chilling and artistically shot, especially the opening close-up of a toy tea-pot pouring imaginary water at the children's make-believe tea party, an image that early on establishes the eerie motif of ghosts. The toy dolls too are effectively creepy, and reappear throughout the film as ghostly presences that give the illusion that the characters are being watched and their movements followed all the time.

The film never quite matches these early high expectations, but it still makes for an effective horror. The plot follows a mourning and financially struggling young lawyer named Arthur Kibbs (Daniel Radcliffe), who having been assigned the task of travelling to a remote estate in the English countryside begins to see frightening visions of a spooky woman dressed in a black mourning gown. Setting out to be a straightforward horror The Woman in Black needs to have enough scares and jumps to satisfy horror enthusiasts, and there are plenty of such unsettling scenes. The Woman in Black of the title makes for an effectively scary figure, expressing plenty of rage and insanity in brief close-ups, such as when she appears as a reflection next to Arthur's face in the mirror. Director Watkins also makes clever use of objects for scares, like a violently swinging rocking chair and the aforementioned dolls.

With all the focus on scares and jumps, the characters in the film are somewhat undeveloped and the plot a little thin. Characters like the landowner Sam Daily (Ciarán Hinds), his wife (Janet McTeer) and even the Woman in Black herself (Liz White) are all well acted, but neither given important roles nor much biography. Mrs Daily in particular is underused, as she puts in a briefly captivating performance as a mourning mother who fills the lonely void left by her dead children with a pair of small dogs, and who frighteningly lapses into seemingly-possessed trances in which she carves disturbing images into wood; but we only see her in a few scenes. To be fair the film prioritizes spooks over these other elements of characterization, but more development would have made for a more complex film.

Daniel Radcliffe is however given lots to do as the protagonist of the film, but isn't entirely convincing. He fails to express the wide variations of emotions, which shifts between loss, grief and fear, which his character experiences during the film. As the character we are left alone with in the haunted house a better performance was needed to adequately hammer home the scares. Admittedly the script does not give him much dialogue to work with and perhaps didn't give the young actor much opportunity to express himself, but we are never convinced of his grief or fear. The haunted house itself, though a little clichéd as an eerie isolated estate full of props like creepy dolls and dim candlelight, is a well crafted location, and thanks to impressive shots of the marshland and scenes filmed on location we really get a feel for the grey remoteness of the British countryside.

Though there are better and scarier films that deal with similar issues, such as the Spanish-Mexican horror The Orphanage, director James Watkins certainly deserves plaudits for the admirable intention of making a horror film that chooses to scare through implication and the imagination rather than lazily using gore and vulgarity, making The Woman in Black a welcome addition to the horror oeuvre. We hope for a future of similarly natured horror movies.