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The Woman in Black (Review)
Feb. 17th, 2012 10:21 amYou know, when your Edwardian spine-chiller film starts with a scene of Daniel Radcliffe telling a four year old boy "You look just like your mother", my immediate reaction is "I bloody well hope not", and it really wrecks suspension of disbelief. Just saying.
Anyway, I went to see The Woman in Black last night at an arty cinema, which means on the one hand it was full of hipsters, but on the other hand they have a bar and you can take your booze into the auditorium, so it's swings and roundabouts really.
The thing was, being an arty cinema they show trailers for arty films - often in foreign languages - before the main feature, which makes a change for me as usually I've whetted my appetite for the film I'm about to see with a few trailers featuring exploding cars and girls in bikinis. What I got this time was the trailer for an incredibly worthy Polish-made holocaust film based on The sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall. Now, I'm as much of a fan of holocaust films as the next man*, but the basic premise of this struck me as having potential - a group of people being hunted by the Nazis hiding out in some Polish sewers. If they'd made it as a sequel to Snakes on a Plane, and had Samuel L. Jackson in an SS uniform shouting "I have had it with these effing jews in this effing drain!" I'd go and see it a hundred times.
Anyway, that aside, the Woman in Black. The plot centres around Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe), a burned-out young London lawyer being sent to settle the estate of the recently-dead owner of a large and rambling country house. This house sits on a Cornish island just off the coast of a village high in the Yorkshire dales which is populated by people with a selection of West Country and Liverpudlian accents, so the geography was slightly confusing but I decided that it was all taking place in the county of Movieshire and after that I didn't mind so much.
Predictably enough, the villagers are surly and unfriendly in the way villagers in horror films always are, and try to put Kipps off going to the spooky old house without ever doing the sensible thing of either a) telling him why he shouldn't go, or b) just resorting to outright threats of physical violence. Instead they glower and say things like "Eeee, tha' mun' go t' spooky old 'ouse, guv squire chim-chim-cheroo" in their curious mishmash of accents, so off Kipps goes where he awakens the spook which lives there.
This spook (the ghost of a suicide many years previously) hangs about the place wearing all black and screaming "I shall never forgive you" a lot - rather like at least one of my ex-girlfriends - and murders local children with gleeful abandon**. Such gleeful abandon, in fact, that for a while the film stops being an adaption of The Woman in Black and turns into The Gashlycrumb Tinies - The Motion Picture.
Indeed, as I watched, I became utterly convinced that Jane Goldman - who adapted the book for the screen - was deliberately referencing the Gashlycrumb Tinies. One child perishes in a fire, one swallows lye, others drown in a bog, are swept out to sea and are squashed flat by a train. The similarities are so great as to be unmissable once you've seen them - especially one late shot of the morbid black-clad ghost surrounded by the ghosts of children which is, compositionally, a direct lift from the cover of the Tinies.
However, despite my mockery, there's a lot of the film to like. It plays its cards well and is a very effective chiller, especially for an extended sequence in the middle where Kipps spends the night in the haunted house. I honestly can't remember the last time I was in the cinema where the film made some members of the audience scream out loud, and it happened twice during the show last night. At another point (the scene at the window, if you've seen it), the girl behind me jumped so hard she threw popcorn all over my head, which simultaneously demonstrated the effectiveness of the scares on offer whilst giving me a free snack. So two good things in one, there. There are a number of very well constructed jumps to be had if you're in the mood for them. Radcliffe uses his three emotions (Confusion, Concern and Earnestness) to their utmost effect and is moderately convincing as the lead and even the ending resists the trap of a climactic clash-of-the-CGI-titans fight which films often fall into (such as the otherwise excellent Silent Hill film).
In all, it's not a great or a classic film, but it does what it sets out to do very well indeed. I fact, I just have one major question. What happens to the dog? It just vanishes halfway through. Answers in comments, please.
*Edit* Actually, no, I have another question: It's Edwardian England, and there's a ghost in the spooky old house. Where the heckers is the vicar?
*i.e. not much. I know how it ends.
**I have at least one ex-girlfriend I wouldn't exactly put that past, either.
Anyway, I went to see The Woman in Black last night at an arty cinema, which means on the one hand it was full of hipsters, but on the other hand they have a bar and you can take your booze into the auditorium, so it's swings and roundabouts really.
The thing was, being an arty cinema they show trailers for arty films - often in foreign languages - before the main feature, which makes a change for me as usually I've whetted my appetite for the film I'm about to see with a few trailers featuring exploding cars and girls in bikinis. What I got this time was the trailer for an incredibly worthy Polish-made holocaust film based on The sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall. Now, I'm as much of a fan of holocaust films as the next man*, but the basic premise of this struck me as having potential - a group of people being hunted by the Nazis hiding out in some Polish sewers. If they'd made it as a sequel to Snakes on a Plane, and had Samuel L. Jackson in an SS uniform shouting "I have had it with these effing jews in this effing drain!" I'd go and see it a hundred times.
Anyway, that aside, the Woman in Black. The plot centres around Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe), a burned-out young London lawyer being sent to settle the estate of the recently-dead owner of a large and rambling country house. This house sits on a Cornish island just off the coast of a village high in the Yorkshire dales which is populated by people with a selection of West Country and Liverpudlian accents, so the geography was slightly confusing but I decided that it was all taking place in the county of Movieshire and after that I didn't mind so much.
Predictably enough, the villagers are surly and unfriendly in the way villagers in horror films always are, and try to put Kipps off going to the spooky old house without ever doing the sensible thing of either a) telling him why he shouldn't go, or b) just resorting to outright threats of physical violence. Instead they glower and say things like "Eeee, tha' mun' go t' spooky old 'ouse, guv squire chim-chim-cheroo" in their curious mishmash of accents, so off Kipps goes where he awakens the spook which lives there.
This spook (the ghost of a suicide many years previously) hangs about the place wearing all black and screaming "I shall never forgive you" a lot - rather like at least one of my ex-girlfriends - and murders local children with gleeful abandon**. Such gleeful abandon, in fact, that for a while the film stops being an adaption of The Woman in Black and turns into The Gashlycrumb Tinies - The Motion Picture.
Indeed, as I watched, I became utterly convinced that Jane Goldman - who adapted the book for the screen - was deliberately referencing the Gashlycrumb Tinies. One child perishes in a fire, one swallows lye, others drown in a bog, are swept out to sea and are squashed flat by a train. The similarities are so great as to be unmissable once you've seen them - especially one late shot of the morbid black-clad ghost surrounded by the ghosts of children which is, compositionally, a direct lift from the cover of the Tinies.
However, despite my mockery, there's a lot of the film to like. It plays its cards well and is a very effective chiller, especially for an extended sequence in the middle where Kipps spends the night in the haunted house. I honestly can't remember the last time I was in the cinema where the film made some members of the audience scream out loud, and it happened twice during the show last night. At another point (the scene at the window, if you've seen it), the girl behind me jumped so hard she threw popcorn all over my head, which simultaneously demonstrated the effectiveness of the scares on offer whilst giving me a free snack. So two good things in one, there. There are a number of very well constructed jumps to be had if you're in the mood for them. Radcliffe uses his three emotions (Confusion, Concern and Earnestness) to their utmost effect and is moderately convincing as the lead and even the ending resists the trap of a climactic clash-of-the-CGI-titans fight which films often fall into (such as the otherwise excellent Silent Hill film).
In all, it's not a great or a classic film, but it does what it sets out to do very well indeed. I fact, I just have one major question. What happens to the dog? It just vanishes halfway through. Answers in comments, please.
*Edit* Actually, no, I have another question: It's Edwardian England, and there's a ghost in the spooky old house. Where the heckers is the vicar?
*i.e. not much. I know how it ends.
**I have at least one ex-girlfriend I wouldn't exactly put that past, either.
