Movie Review: The Woman in Black

“A young lawyer travels to a remote village where he discovers the vengeful ghost of a scorned woman is terrorizing the locals.”

Genre : Horror, Thriller

Director : James Watkins

Writers : Jane Goldman based on Susan Hill’s novel

Cast : Daniel Radcliffe, Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer

Hot off his career-making (and perhaps -binding) role as everyone’s favorite boy wizard, Daniel Radcliffe needs to answer a question that is undoubtedly being asked: what now? Is Harry Potter the jumping-off point for an enduring, rich career in acting, or will it remain his only true claim to stardom? It’s a difficult question and an answer will not be clear for some time. The Woman in Black, although not a step in the right direction, was a safe move for the young actor now searching for his identity.

Set around the start of the Twentieth Century, The Woman in Black is the story of Arthur Kipps, a young accountant in London assigned to travel some remote village “to the northeast” (as a sign at the train station tells us) to comb through the paperwork of the deceased owner of a creepy mansion in the middle of marshland that floods with the tide and leaves it secluded for hours at a time. Upon arriving in the Village-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, Kipps is met with creepy, standoffish locals who obviously don’t want him there for some reason. Insisting that he get his work done like the standup Englishman he is, however, he finds a way to the mansion and, whilst poring over documents, is harassed by the maligned phantom of a woman wearing a black dress, who, as legend goes, whenever she is seen, appears to children and behests them to kill themselves. What follows is a dull, ill-paced struggle between living and dead that’ll have you yawning more than shrieking.

This is not to say that the movie is all bad. The atmosphere works, and is interesting, at least, in a market of high-tech horrors and people shaking camcorders around screaming, “Monster!” And there are moments that induce fear quite effectively, especially if the supernatural strikes a nerve with you. However, the entire movie feels like that creepy scene in a horror movie for two hours. My date fell asleep for about ten minutes and when she woke up and asked me what she had missed, the only thing I could tell her was, “Harry Potter investigated a noise. Then there was another noise, and he investigated that one, too.” While effective the first few times, investigating noises and seeing a sudden apparition becomes too frequent and very tiresome.

The entire movie ended up consisting of Kipps being stalked by the ghost and Kipps finding dull, ultimately irrelevant exposition from the documents he was investigating. Nothing developed beyond that. Not even the villagers’ creeping mistrust of Kipps came to anything. And the third act was such a formulaic injection that you get the feeling it was only there to satisfy what the writer thinks she learned in film school. And it sports an ending so preposterously out of touch that there wasn’t a dry eye between us as we burst into uncontrollable laughter in the theater.

The good news for Radcliffe is that The Woman in Black will never be taken seriously, and, as such, can’t damage his quest of sustaining a post-Harry Potter career. Was he bad in it? -No. Was he good? -Sure, but only in that the majority of acting skill he demonstrated was looking intensely into the camera. A very nondescript acting gig in a very nondescript movie is a safe move for Radcliffe. The expectation is not too high and he puts himself out there and tells the world that he’s still here, still acting. Alright, so we won’t know how it turns out for him just yet, but at least his first choice post-Potter was low-key and lacked pomp. Yeah, he’s a star, but he’s not out there demanding the biggest roles in the biggest movies. That deserves some respect. The Woman in Black, however, does not.

Grade: D+