Director: James Watkins
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, Liz White
Cinematic Release: 10th February 2012
Budget: $15 million
Box Office: $127 million
The Woman in Black is a dark thriller/horror set in small-town Edwardian England, released in February 2012. Produced by horror powerhouse Hammer Film Productions, with Irish favourite Ciarán Hinds backing up lead man Daniel Radcliffe, we had high expectations for this film and it didn’t fail to impress.
The film follows Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe), a London lawyer struggling to cope with the pressures of his career and the care of a 4 year old son after his wife died in childbirth. The early scenes of the film see Arthur reluctantly leaving his son in London to tend to the sale of a deceased widow’s estate in a remote northern town, with his employment relying on his success. It is this estate, Eel Marsh House, that takes centre stage throughout the unfolding of a gruesome story. Upon arriving in the tiny, drab seafront town, Arthur finds himself already out of favour with the locals, with the innkeeper refusing him board and his legal contact, Jerome, warning him against going to Eel Marsh House and insisting that he return to London immediately. Defying the warnings of the locals, Kipps proceeds to the abandoned estate, which is perched on a small island in the salt marshes of the coast and accessible only at low tide. It doesn’t take long for the film’s unsettling brand of horror to begin, with flashes of just-out-of-shot shadows and strange noises making the huge, junk-filled house seem claustrophobic to the viewer.
The bulk of the film takes place over the following two days, when gruesome deaths begin to shake the town, and Arthur is plagued by glimpses of a ghostly woman in a black dress. The longer he spends in Eel Marsh House, the more frequent and more jarring the anomalies around the estate become. The scares in this flick are sudden and jolting; while never overly dramatic or bloody, their frequency and lack of warning is deeply chilling, especially as they form a backdrop to Arthur’s slow uncovering of the abnormal deaths of local children and the descent into madness of the house’s recently deceased owner.
As the story unwinds we are subjected to near-constant suspense as Arthur, thrown against his will into a world of supernatural horrors, struggles to figure out why the dead are restless in the little town, and what he can do to prevent further killings with the help of wealthy local Samuel Daily (Ciarán Hinds).
An excellently paced story and measured, rarely overdone scares mean that The Woman in Black keeps the viewer’s attention from beginning to end. A genuinely well told tale is a welcome relief in a horror genre that has spent much of the last decade sliding deeper and deeper into slasher fare. Radcliffe impresses in his first film release outside of the Harry Potter series since 2007 – though the role does not ask much of him outside of dark and intense body acting, a lesser actor might have degraded the character to broody. Special mention must also go to the props team, as the myriad of rotting old toys and terrifying, cobweb-laden stuffed monkeys that cluttered Eel Marsh House were instrumental in providing the kind of atmosphere necessary to pull off the low-key frights that made The Woman in Black so unsettling.
There are many reasons that The Woman in Black has become the highest-grossing British horror film of the last 20 years. It is subtle enough to appeal to non-fans of the genre, and fresh enough to appease horror nuts. While it stumbles on a rarely-present score and a quiet ending, these don’t take away from the film enough to be damning, so overall we highly recommend it.
Rating: 8/10
If you like this you’ll love: Drag Me To Hell, The Others, The Exorcism of Emily Rose
[Words, Rebekah Burke]
Editor-in-Chief, part-time super villain and hoarder of cats. If you can’t find me writing, I’m probably in the kitchen!
