The Woman in Black
DIRECTED BY JAMES WATKINS
Perhaps the only thing more creepy than Victorian children—all pale, and sullen, and dressed like miniature adults—were the “toys” the pint-size terrors were expected to play with: dead-eyed porcelain dolls for little Mildred; for Edmund, a sneering, cymbal-clanking monkey.
Simply by virtue of featuring plenty of the above, James Watkins’ The Woman in Black is an unnerving experience, even before the titular spectre begins to coax kids into suicide. Her ghostly pied piper routine is the terrible secret of the village of Crythin Gifford, and the reason its inhabitants don’t take kindly to strangers. So the locals believe, whenever someone lays eyes on the Woman in Black, the death of a child soon follows. While they all know to steer clear of the remote mansion where the vengeful apparition is thought to prowl, unwitting newcomers are liable to meddle.
So it proves with the arrival from London of a widowed solicitor named Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe). His firm has been engaged to administer the estate of Alice Drablow, who, naturally, was the occupant of that same remote mansion. Despite a decidedly cool reception from the villagers, Kipps is keen to see to Drablow’s affairs, and ventures resolutely to Eel Marsh House. He gradually discovers why the locals keep their distance, but not before a few of Crythin Gifford’s youngsters decide to re-enact choice pages from Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
The Woman in Black is actually based on Susan Hill’s oft-adapted novel of the same title, and is about as old-fashioned as ghost stories come. But Watkins breathes fresh life into the subject matter precisely by embracing that old-fashioned-ness to the hilt, shrouding his film in a shivery atmosphere that draws on the inherent spookiness of the period. Kipps’ overnight stay in the haunted manse features plenty of familiar frights and fake-outs, but the veneer of Victorian decrepitude—particularly in the toy-filled nursery—succeeds in amping up the eerieness.
Radcliffe just about sells Kipps as a vaguely tortured soul, and Jane Goldman’s screenplay departs from Hill’s novel to deliver a pleasantly macabre conclusion. Without wishing to disrespect Harry Potter die-hards, however, it’s Watkins’ deft staging of the film’s vintage scares that’s the real star of show.