The Woman in Black

Rating: 5/10 (25 February 2012)

Hammer (Horror) Studios were revived in 2007, and came back with worthwhile remake Let Me In and silly The Resident, it was good to see they were making a classic ghost story, and I was looking forward also to seeing the child star grown up in a different role, from director James Watkins (Eden Lake) and writer Jane Goldman, Jonathan Ross's wife (Stardust, Kick-Ass). Basically, set in the Edwardian period, Arthur Kipps (Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe) is the young lawyer who has become depressed due to the death of his beautiful wife Stella (Sophie Stuckey) who died while giving birth to their son Joseph (Misha Handley). He is obviously caring for his now toddler son, who spends a lot of time making drawings of the family - with his father in them with a sad face. Arthur is assigned to complete paperwork for the sale of a large house on a marsh near an obscure village, and all the people there live in fear, so he is shunned on his arrival and stay. Alice Drabow was the owner of the Eel House estate, and she lived there with her husband, son Nathaniel (Ashley Foster), and her sister Jennet Humfrye (Liz White), and obviously Arthur has to look at the house itself too. As time goes by and Arthur is forced to stay in the house, due to the marsh water level rising, strange and mysterious things are happening, such as creaky noises and seeing things, and he realises that the house is haunted by the ghost of a woman scorned. He asks questions to the villagers, and he learns that the ghost of the Woman in Black is that of Jennett, and she is seeking revenge for the death of her son, who is actually Nathaniel, and was taken away from her. The only people who are friends to Arthur and willing to help him in the situation are local landowner Sam Daily (Ciarán Hinds) and his wife Elizabeth (Janet McTeer), as they understand what it is like to lose a son. They give him information concerning the estate, the background to the story of the Woman in Black to help an investigation, and Sam even helps Arthur pull out the body of Nathaniel from the marsh. Using a number of windup toys Arthur must lure the ghost into the son's room so that she can see her boy and be at peace, and after a short attack she disappears, and he lays the body of her son by her side in her grave. In the end Arthur is reunited with his son Joseph, but then the curse of the ghost, where children are forced to kill themselves, strikes one more time, as Arthur and his son are hit by a train, but in death they are finally reunited with Stella, and the Woman in Black looks on to freak you out. Also starring carriage driver Daniel Cerqueira as Keckwick and Tim McMullan as local solicitor Jerome. This is a good choice of film for Radcliffe, seeing how he spent the last ten years as the boy wizard, and it shows he does have a good range, hopefully this will continue into other genres. As for the film, it has all the right elements for a good classic scary movie, a haunted house where the victim is isolated, good tense music by Marco Beltrami, and a good amount of jumps, the biggest being near the end with a horrible high pitch scream from the ghost, it is not all that scary all the way through, but it is certainly a horror thriller to see. Worth watching!