A haunted lawyer?
A creaking, shrieking haunted-house amusement and a solid addition to the recently resurrected Hammer Films, The Woman in Black, makes the most of its old-fashioned virtues. Duded out in a period frock coat and pocket-watch chain for his first post-Potter film role, Daniel Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a British lawyer who, years after his wife died in childbirth, has the haunted eyes of the eternal mourner.
The story weaves together a compendium of familiar themes. Arthur’s employer, who’s all but run out of patience with him, gives him one last chance to prove his worth: he’s to travel to the remote village of Crythin Gifford to sort out the large estate of a woman who’s recently died. So Arthur boards a train and heads straight into the mysteries of an isolated hamlet.
Something wicked does come. It seems there’s a ghost troubling the area, haunting the estate. Bewilderingly, most of the villagers treat Arthur with unexplained hostility, glowering and slamming doors. Undaunted, he secures a sympathetic ally in a friendly local, Mr Daily (Ciaran Hinds)and Daily’s dotty wife (Janet McTeer, enjoying herself). With their aid Arthur begins poking about the estate that, set high on an isolated marsh, comes with both gravestones and spooks. Director Watkins fills the film with squeaking doors and floorboards, pools of black, long silences and an assortment of moldering toys. Less gore is more here, and what a relief. The Woman in Black isn’t especially scary, but it keeps you on edge. Radcliffe makes a sturdy, sympathetic center for the tale, even if the ghost of Potter past hovers in his every gesture.
There isn’t much by way of dashing heroics here, but Arthur is almost continually on the move. At times he looks so small engulfed in all that darkness, and so helpless, much like one of the children who haunt the story without investing it with much feeling. With Watkins’s creeping camerawork it’s Arthur who keeps the story steadily moving forward inch by inch, shiver by shiver.
—© 2012 The New York Times
Posted on: 2012-02-04 09:13
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