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Daniel Radcliffe has spent most of the last decade casting spells, riding brooms, and battling the evil Lord Voldemort. Now that he’s graduated from Hogwarts, though, the Harry Potter star seems to be easing himself into the post-Potter movie biz, once again battling the supernatural in director James Watkins’s eerie haunted house thriller, The Woman in Black.
Radcliffe stars as Arthur Kipps, a young lawyer who’s sent on assignment to a small village, where he’s supposed to handle the estate of a recently deceased woman named Alice Deblow. As soon as he arrives in the village, however, it becomes clear that he doesn’t know the whole story. The people seem to be trying to get rid of him—but, desperate to keep his job, he refuses to leave.
After his first visit to Alice Deblow’s home, he starts to understand the people’s fears. He hears voices in and around the house, and he sees a woman dressed in black wandering through the garden. Like his new friend, Sam Daily (Ciarán Hinds), he refuses to get caught up in the villagers’ superstitions—until children start dying in horrible ways.
The horror genre seems to have focused its attention on torture flicks and found footage thrillers in recent years. Personally, though, I still prefer a good, old-fashioned ghost story—like 2011’s carnival funhouse-creepy Insidious. And The Woman in Black has all of the elements of a classic scary movie—from the old haunted house with its eerie, gothic feel to the vengeful ghost who lurks in the shadows, at the edges of the frame.
The film is spooky and unsettling—especially as Arthur wanders through the house by himself (usually at night, of course), seeking out the source of the creaks and bumps and voices that travel from room to room. It’s filled with tense, armrest-gripping silences, which are usually followed by cheap scares that are guaranteed to have the audience giggling nervously, anxiously bracing themselves for the next glimpse of the ghost.
Unfortunately, though, that’s pretty much all there is to it. Most of the film involves Arthur wandering through the dark, creepy house, while very little attention is given to the story—to the ghostly woman, her young victims, or the villagers (who, for some reason, haven’t packed up and left town, despite the fact that some creepy ghost keeps killing their children). The story is an interesting one, but it’s barely developed, making the multitude of long, suspenseful scenes in the house seem to drag.
Of course, when it comes to eerie suspense and scares that will make you jump out of your seat, The Woman in Black does its job. But it has just the specter of a creepy story, barely building on all those things that go bump in the night.
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