text: I love ghost stories in general, but I PARTICULARLY LOVE chilly, atmospheric and elegantly creepy British period-style ghost stories. This one qualifies on all counts. A naive young lawyer ("solicitor" in Britspeak) is sent to a small village near the seaside to settle an elderly, deceased woman's estate. It's the 1920s, a time when many middle-class Brits go to the seaside on vacation for "their health." Well, guess what, there's nothing "healthy" about the village of Crythin Gifford, the creepy site of the elderly woman's hulking, brooding Victorian estate, which is located on the fringes of a fog-swathed salt marsh. When the lawyer saves the life of a small girl (none of the locals will help the endangered tot -- you find out why later on in the film), he inadvertently incurs the wrath of a malevolent spirit, the woman in black. She is no filmy, gauzy wraith, but a solid black silhouette of malice and evil. The viewer only sees her a few times, but you feel her malevolent presence in every frame. As the camera creeps up on the lawyer while he's reading through legal papers, you expect to see the woman in black at any moment. When the lawyer goes out to the generator shed to turn on the electricity for the creepy old house, the camera snakes in on him and you think she'll pop up there, too. Waiting for the woman in black to show up is nail-bitingly suspenseful. We've seen many elements of this story before(the locked room that no one enters, the fog, the naive outsider who ignores the locals' warnings) but the director somehow manages to combine them all into a completely new-seeming and compelling ghost story. Watch it with a buddy so you can have someone warm to grab onto while waiting for the woman in black. . .