Radcliffe grows up in 'Woman in Black'
★★★
In The Woman in Black, the child who became a star playing a boy wizard convincingly makes the transition from Harry Potter to Arthur Kipps. From scene one of this ghost story adapted from British author Susan Hill’s 1982 novel, Daniel Radcliffe leaves J.K. Rowling’s wizard world behind.
Radcliffe’s Arthur is a young father devastated by his wife’s death by childbirth. Although it’s been four years since his dear Stella died giving life to their son, Joseph, Arthur’s grief is unrelenting. He’s beset with depression, overdue bills and a boss who says, yes, you’ve had a hard time, but if you don’t shape up now you’re out.
Arthur gets a last chance to make himself right with the London law firm that employs him.
Director James Watkins (Eden Lake, My Little Eye) and screenwriter Jane Goldman (The Debt, X-Men: First Class) and the crew of this British production that bears a legendary name in horror, Hammer Films, do a wonderfully moody job of setting the scene for Arthur’s battle with a vengeful supernatural entity.
Dispatched to an isolated English village for the purpose of putting a deceased client’s papers in order and ensuring that the firm has her proper last will and testament, Arthur finds the locals uncooperative. At first the people of Crythin Gifford are merely vaguely unfriendly. They simply want him to leave.
The villagers soon turn outwardly hostile. Most of all, they want to keep their children from Arthur’s sight.
The real village of Halton Gill, a community in northern England with houses that are hundreds of years old, stands in for the village of Crythin Gifford. What appears on film is authentically timeless and menacing.
The other key setting in The Woman in Black is Eel March House. It, too, is a real English place and, with a little help from set designers, it projects a brooding personality. Much of the film’s paranormal activities take place in and around the old place and its overgrown grounds and neglected graveyard. And when violent night storms wash over the haunted house that sits above a moonscape of marsh, the storms seem less a cliché than just the right touch.
The 22-year-old Radcliffe carries Arthur’s burdens with much strength. In The Woman in Black, he exhibits the intensity and determination he’d shown in the more dramatic, stressful Potter film scenes and then some. Arthur, at the brink of taking his own life as the story begins, rallies in Crythin Gifford, throwing himself into solving the mystery behind the horrific events that plague the village.
The Woman in Black, effectively creepy and rich in dark shadows, may move slowly for the impatient, mobile device-possessed among us, but it’s a finely staged ghost story. It’s also a great sign that Hammer Films, the British studio that released classic horror films starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the 1950s and ’60s, is back in Black.