Chilling and Imaginative.

Rating: 7/10 (26 June 2012)

After seeing this in the cinema, and really enjoying it upon first watch, I felt inclined to pick this up on DVD. I think what's so marvellous about this film, is that James Watkins has successfully managed to capture such a chilling and uneasy atmosphere. The Victorian setting works extremely well, and is the perfect era for a good old fashioned ghost story.
I've always felt that one of the best elements of a horror film is suggestion (creaking floorboards, sounds etc), and to an extent, this film has done it remarkably. It's very refreshing to see a horror film that relies on psychological terror, rather than in your face blood and gore, something that has sadly became one of the main conventions of a horror movie. Yes, the jump moments were a little predictable, but they had an extremely nice build up, and at some points, did genuinely unnerve me. This film takes the expected, and predicable, and something that has been done so many times before, and totally makes it look refreshing.
BUT, I think that it lost it's footing towards the end. it didn't ruin it, but I think it became a lot less terrifying, simply because It almost abandoned the suggestive and started to become a lot less scarier. It's like Watkins lost some of his nerve and tried to give us more by showing us what the Woman In Black actually looked like, and because of this, I think the film lost something. This is very upsetting, because if Watkins had relied more on suggestion, and gave us glimpses of the Woman in Black, and made it more psychological, which, in his defence, he did do right up until the 'screaming window' sequence, I think it probably would've been one of my favourite films.
Daniel Radcliffe may not be the best actor in the world, far from it, but he is simply wonderful in this film. What I love most about his performance is that he really has tried to distance himself from the role of Harry Potter, and this has worked to a massive degree. I never once thought of anything to do with Harry Potter during the course of this film, I simply saw Radcliffe in another role, and I feel that this is such a massive accomplishment for such a young actor, and considering Hallows Part 2 was not even a year ago, he has done a really really good job. Another thing about his performance, is that he does it to the best of his ability, there's a lot of physical acting required in this film, by which I mean facial expressions and trying to convey a massive amount of vulnerability and terror without speaking, and this is I feel one of the hardest things for an actor to do. It's hard enough for actors to successfully pull the audience into the film, and act scared around other characters, but to do it completely on your own, that is a huge resonsibility for a young actor, and I think Radcliffe pulled it off perfectly.
Overall, it's a fantastic ghost story, only ruined by the antagonist stepping out the shadows and showing herself. Like I said, if we didn't see her face, and she stayed under the vale, then this film would've been a solid 4 star for me. It's very very high quality overall though, and one of the very few films that still remains to unnerve me.