What was all the fuss about?

Rating: 5/10 (12 February 2019)

'The Woman In Black (2012)' is relatively faithful to its source story. The changes it makes are usually only to shorten its timespan or to make things more overt, especially when it comes to its scares. Something was certainly lost in translation, however. The constant first-person perspective of the book isn't portrayed anywhere near as strongly on film, and the simultaneously in-the-moment but ultimately reflexive narration isn't carried across at all, which is somewhat natural but still unfortunate. These elements may be missing due to the change in medium, and are actually common casualties of adaptation, but they could have been smoothed over with some slight tweaks to the story and its presentation. I'm not suggesting that narration would have been a good idea, but the flick needs to communicate the inner thoughts of its protagonist more clearly (via whatever means feel natural) in order for it to be truly engaging. The book is written in the style of nineteenth-century 'gothic horror' and, as such, has subtle psychological horror as opposed to overt scares. It relies on the fact that we're always in the head of the 'hero', as most of the scary stuff is only scary because of the way it affects him. It's the kind of story where an ill feeling, a bump in the night and a barking dog provide all the horror necessary, leaving us with a PTSD-ridden protagonist barely able to recount his tale. In this movie, none of that really comes across. While it isn't necessarily silly, most of the spooky stuff is far too 'on-the-nose' and, frankly, clichéd to really work. It leans on 'jump scares' and the same 'face-in-the-background' gag to get its audience going, but it's never really frightening, to be frank. There are some creepy plot elements, though; a specific choice, which changes the way its antagonist interacts with her 'prey' (so to speak), is quite disturbing or, at least, challenging, if slightly superfluous and 'edgy' for the sake of it. When it gets going, it's not bad. It's just that most of the piece is actually quite boring. Radcliffe creeps around looking decently freaked-out, settles down and does a bit of paper-work, comes across a bit of exposition, gets haunted by a ghost and then gets shunned by the townsfolk. This repeats a few times until a third-act that feels off-brand and unearned. The ending is also strange, mainly because of a market-tested addition that aims to make it 'happy'. Overall, the picture lacks the interesting themes of the story that it's based on, even though the plot is more or less intact. Of course, an adaptation can change things (such as the ending), for better or worse, but the end result should still hold up. Here, the deliberate changes actually do less damage than the accidental ones. Regardless of the reason, this ends up as a dull and uninspired horror that isn't scary and isn't actually all that interesting, either. It just feels like a poor man's 'The Conjuring (2013)'. 5/10