The Woman In Black - review

Back in 1983, Susan Hill wrote an exquisitely restrained gothic yarn about a cheerful lawyer called Arthur Kipps, sent to a village to sort out the papers of Mrs Drablow, inhabitant of an isolated mansion called Eel Marsh House. Hill's villagers are wary but sensible folk, no deaths take place while Kipps is in the region and the titular "woman", Jennet, is a single, solitary ghost.

In Hammer Horror's reworking of the story, our hero (Daniel Radcliffe) is a cash-strapped widower, pale and neurotic. Meanwhile, the townsfolk are nuts, violent deaths are two a penny and the undead are legion.

It shouldn't work, but somehow it does. Kipps, you will be astonished to learn, does not get a good night's sleep when he stays over at Eel Marsh House. Cruel-eyed dolls, loud bangs, a bloody creature in the bedsheets ...Watching him blunder around the haunted mansion is like being strapped into an unhinged fairground ride: scary, funny and genuinely jolting.

For all the tweaking, you see, screenwriter Jane Goldman stays true to the spirit of Hill's story.

Hill's anti-heroine is a disenfranchised mother who turns the tables on respectable folk.

Similarly, in the film, there's nothing the living can do to contain Jennet's fury. Her unhealthy passion defines the narrative. She gets the last word (or, in this case, look).

Does that bode ill for Radcliffe, an actor desperate to break with the past? (The Woman In Black marks his first appearance in a big-budget, non-HP movie). The project won't silence his critics. It should, however, swing floating voters. His occasional woodenness fits with the schlock and when he's good, he's gripping.
Seems there's life in the old boy yet. Harry Potter, RIP.

The Woman in Black world premiere is this evening at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank.

The Woman In Black
Cert 15, 95 minutes