Womanly Affection

Yesterday, I went to see the new movie, The Woman in Black. It's a period horror movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as a young widower with a young son, sent by his law firm to a spooky country house to resolve the legal paperwork there. Haunting ensues.

The movie marks a wonderful return to a form not seen nearly often enough today, in my view. This horror film is not intended to gross you out, it is intended to scare you. And while it does resort to loud noises and louder musical accents on occasion, the great thing is that mostly, the film does it with good, old-fashioned, creepy suspense and dread. The most effective scenes in the film involve minute-long sequences where you can see the scare coming (or sometimes hear it; or sometimes imagine it), but wheeeeen willlll iiiiit arriiiiiiiiive. To me, this is what good horror should be.

Daniel Radcliffe is quite good in the film. He's a very sympathetic main character, and manages to portray the sad introspection called for in the script without turning it into dark brooding. A great deal of the film calls for him to be on screen alone in the haunted house, with no one to play off of and no dialogue to deliver. He manages a very effective performance where you can read on his face the wheels of his thought turning. It's a fairly good choice of movie for him as an actor, trying to stride from the long shadow of Harry Potter.

But the film does at times actively work against him in this regard. For starters, while the audience may want to work its hardest to suspend disbelief and accept Radcliffe as someone other than Harry Potter, asking us to accept him as father of a four year old boy is a bit of a stretch. Granted, at Radcliffe's actual age (particularly given the 1890s setting of the film), it's fine, and yet we all just saw Radcliffe "graduate" from "high school" in the final Harry Potter film just a few months ago.

The trappings of the 1890s also occasionally suggest Harry Potter. When Radcliffe's character boards a cross-country train, it's hard to not to think "Hogwarts Express." When he runs into a trio of children -- two boys and a girl -- the specters of Harry, Ron, and Hermione are conjured. And Radcliffe's main co-star is Ciarán Hinds, who played Aberforth in the final Potter film. All superficial details, of course, and unfair to latch on to, but it nevertheless takes a good 20 minutes (when the real scares begin) to really set Radcliffe's indelible film history aside.

Once you can, though, the film is a very effective horror piece. The atmosphere is dark, the Macguffin well thought out, the scares scary, the music effective, and the ending appropriate. As I mentioned earlier, there are just a few cheap scares earned with loud noises and quick camera cuts, but I forgive the indulgences when so many other scares in the movie are earned more honestly.

I was hopeful about the movie after hearing praise from some friends, and then I was still pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I grade it an A-, and give it an enthusiastic recommendation to anyone who likes tense, chilling horror movies.