A one-trick pony.

Rating: 5/10 (2 June 2012)

"Never forgive.
A young lawyer (Daniel Radcliffe), widowed from the day of his child's birth, leaves his young son for a few days in London in order to handle the sale of a house in a small village. The villagers are less than welcoming, and the more time he spends there, the more he learns a the tragedy that has and continues to befall the children of the village... and the more he may be putting his own son's life in danger.
The Woman in Black is a frustrating movie. For every interesting story turn, there's an irritating flaw that keeps it from being as good as it could have been. My biggest peeve rests on the film's over-reliance on jump scares. They're used so often and predictably that they mostly ruin the effect that the creepy environments manage to muster. It just destroys the immersion factor in a movie for me when there's a loud bang and something suddenly appears in the frame over and over and over.
On the positive side, the period setting is a nice change of pace, the story does unravel in an interesting way, and Racliffe does a decent job (though a lot of the time he's just gazing somberly off in the distance or resolutely investigating a suspicious noise, on the way to his next jump scare).
The Woman in Black isn't bad, it just doesn't do enough to make itself stand out amongst a dozen supernatural thrillers, and it relies far too much on scare tactics that annoy me far more than they spook me. I don't mean to dissuade anyone from seeing it who's interested, just temper your expectations.