Well done Asian horror... by the British

Rating: 7/10 (30 June 2012)

If you take The Ring, replace the maltreated girl with a desperately insane mother and lose the whole tape/TV connection, you get something really close to The Woman in Black.
The film started a little bit like Dracula, with the legal clerk coming to a remote village to put some papers in order. It appears that even ghosts hate lawyers, so it all gets messy really soon. The actors were decent enough and the film spooky, but the thing that bothered me most was the cheap scares: sudden loud sounds, screeching ghosts appearing in reflective surfaces, the really old and annoying "something moving in my peripheral field of view" and the ending. Not the ending ending, but let's say the few minutes before the ending. It felt so fake.
Bottom line: a classic (and by that I mean filled with clichés) ghost horror, with Daniel Radcliff finally shedding that Harry Potter adolescent off his casting persona in the lead role. It's not what was in the film that made it average, but mostly what wasn't. So much potential and what they end up doing is an Asian horror with a British accent.