Review: Woman in Black (Directed by James Watkins)
Woman in Black ( Directed by James Watkins. Starring: Daniel Radcliffe and Ciarán Hinds. Watched the DVD (no special features on the rental disk).
First off, I really like movies and books that are a bit ambiguous as to what is going on especially at the end. Also, I really don’t mind having to work a bit to figure out what’s happened and what’s happening in a film provided I feel entertained by the end of the movie.
I really didn’t have much of a clue about what the Woman in Black was about before seeing it. All I’d heard is that it was similar to Turn of the Screw (book by Henry James) or a type of psychological thriller. After seeing the movie, I’ll agree that it is very much a psychological thriller horror but it is much closer to The Grudge (2005) an American remake of the Japanese film, Ju-on (2004).
Check out this trailer for Woman in Black:
In the movie, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) is a lawyer who is sent to deal with all the papers at Eel Marsh House outside the village of Cryphin Gifford. The house is located away from the village on a jutting piece of land that is cut off during high tide. The owners are dead and Kipps firm is settling the estate. On the train he meets Mr. Daily (Ciarán Hinds) who lives near the village and offers to drive him to the village in when they arrive at the station.
In the village, Kipps leans that he doesn’t have a room at the inn. The local lawyer is acting strangely and the villagers seem to want him to leave as soon as possible –preferably without going out to the house. Of course, Kipps must do the job he was sent there to do before his son and the nanny arrive in a few days for what he’d hoped would be a holiday. (Kipps is a widower and a single father still mourning the loss of his wife who died giving birth to a son, Joseph.)
With that setup, most viewers would expect that with rich landowners dead and the house empty and a cagey local lawyer, that the entire village is up to something. However, from the first scene of the film, you know that something more sinister is going on. The problem is that no one is talking and since Kipps is the person that the camera is following, viewers can only wonder at what he sees and doesn’t see and try to piece together the backstory from the clues as Kipps discovers them.
There’s also a great deal of little things that happen subtly in the background and if you blink you miss them — such as the eye looking back at Kipps from a moving picture viewer that he finds in the house — only no one is there in the room with him. He comes across documents that hint that the house holds many more secrets than just strange noises and shapes seen in windows or out of the corner of his eye as he works.
There’s not much more I can say without spoiling the movie for you. The house and the surroundings are perfect for such a movie — dark and mysterious with times when it is cut off from the rest of the world. Sullen villagers who don’t want anyone to upset the fragile balance they have achieve with the evil that walks among them.
The setting and direction manage to keep you glued to your seat, hoping against hope that what you fear is going on is wrong and fearful that you’re right. Then there’s the hope that everything will turn out okay at the end after all. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t make any difference at all. That’s where the ambiguity comes in — in the end you make your own decision about what kind of ending the movie has and whether it is optimistic or pessimistic.
As always, I’m interested in the views of others. So if you’ve seen the movie, what did you think about it?