That stalwart of Sixties cinema, the horror house, Hammer, is having somewhat of a renaissance with the release of its first ever feature ghost story, THE WOMAN IN BLACK (M).

The home of horror, Hammer was responsible for creating an icon of Christopher Lee in a series of Dracula movies that bewitched and bedeviled and bemused baby boomers.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK is somewhat of a franchise itself, originally a novel penned by Susan Hill, it has been adapted to radio, television and the stage over the past thirty years, and now, finally, a film.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK has all the accoutrements, or to be cruel, clichés, of the creep show.

There are children, there are dolls, there’s a rocking chair that rocks by itself, there’s the old, dark house, there’s the graveyard and there’s a family tragedy.

Like Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Arthur Kipps is a solicitor sent by his firm to a remote and uninviting place to tidy up affairs that are more nefarious than straight forward.

Kipps himself has just suffered a tragedy and may or may not be of sound mind to investigate a last will and testament.
Jane Goldman’s script is competent and James Watkins direction is complimentary keeping the clichés and conventions of the genre in constant motion. It is to their credit they keep the creeps to atmosphere, glimpses rather than gratuitous gore fests.

As Kipps, Daniel Radcliffe is suitably gormless, while Ciaran Hinds and Janet McTeer bring solid support to the solicitor suckered by a sequence of unease.

There is a sense of déjà vu, a feeling we’ve seen it all before, and the narrative does wax and wane, although the wax candles never seem to wane at all, a plentiful number alight in the spooky old house in the dead of night.

When not scaring the living daylights out of grief stricken solicitors, it would appear the apparition tends dutifully to the dying nightlights.

© Richard Cotter

17th May, 2012

Tags: Sydney Movie Reviews- THE WOMAN IN BLACK, Richard Cotter, Sydney Arts Guide