Film Friday: The Woman in Black (2012)

Every once in awhile, a movie surprises you. I can definitely say that’s the case with The Woman in Black. Let’s see, we have a low budget, clichéd, Victorian Era haunted house film staring Harry Potter and directed by a newbie. Yeah. This thing had “weak” and “derivative” written all over it. So imagine my surprise to find one of the best horror films in a very long time.

** spoiler alert **

Plot

The Woman in Black stars Daniel Radcliff as Arthur Kipps, a junior lawyer in a Victorian Era law firm who is about to be fired. His wife died giving birth to his son and he’s spent the next five years living aimlessly and distracted. As a last chance, his boss sends him to some podunk village in the middle of nowhere to handle the estate of a woman name Alice Drablow and to sell her house, a creepy place called the Eel Marsh House, which is situated in the middle of a marsh. She had just died.

When Kipps arrives in the village, he finds the locals to be extremely hostile. They all want him to leave immediately. But he needs to finish his job or he will be fired, so he proceeds to Marsh House. As he looks through Alice’s papers, he learns that Alice had a sister named Jennet Humfrye. Jennet was mentally disturbed and blamed Alice and her husband for her son dying in the marsh. They never found the body.

As Kipps works, he starts seeing signs of a young woman. For example, he sees a hand on a window and a shadow run across a room. Doors open and close and a rocking chair moves itself. He then returns to the town for the night. When he gets back to the town, a young girl dies in his arms. She poisoned herself. He then learns that most of the children in this town have died, always of suicides, and the townsfolk hate him because they think he’s started the wave of suicides to begin again. Kipps ignores them and returns to Marsh House where he soon finds himself playing cat and mouse with the ghost of Jennet, who seeks revenge against all she encounters by taking their children from them.

What A Well Done Film!

Ok, here are all the warning signs with this film: Radcliff was still fresh from Harry Potter, and it wasn’t clear he was up to anything else. The film was produced by Hammer, who make cheap and generally kitsch films. Never heard of the director. The critics called the film “traditional to a fault,” which reeks of clichés, and they said it wasn’t scary enough for modern audiences. The Victorian-Era setting also sounded like it would be a problem because we don’t relate to the way they handled their fears. But none of this turned out to be a problem because the director made some brilliant choices.

This film was directed by James Watkins who gets a ton of credit for taking the “creepy imagery” horror story we first saw with the wave of Japanese films like The Grudge and adding a layer of creep to it. He did this in two ways that I think merit discussion. First, he understood that distance adds to the creep factor. Most of the “creepy imagery” horror stories try to scare you by showing you creepy images, like undead kids standing in your living room. But after a quick scene or two, the directors invariably hike up the shock value by having the creature touching the hero or jumping in their face to scare them. While this is effective in stepping up the shock, it simultaneously wipes out the fear-of-the-unknown factor because now we see the thing and we know its intentions and the limits of its powers. All that creepy ambiguity and dreaded potential vanishes. Emotionally, this is the difference between being handed a wrapped gift and being handed an open box.

Watkins does it differently. He spends a lot more time with things happening at a distance. You will see a hand across the room against a window for a brief moment or an empty rocking chair at the other end of the room. You will see a shadow move across the other end of a hallway, a ghost walking toward the house from a grave, and a face appearing a few feet over Kipps’ shoulder. What this does is it gives you a sense that things are closing in on Kipps. That’s ominous and it keeps you thinking, “Run for your life before it’s too late!” By comparison, in The Grudge, your “flight instinct” never activates because you know she can’t escape the thing. Moreover, because of this approach, Watkins never gives us a good look at anything nor do we get a sense of its intentions or its powers until late in the film. That keeps the fear of the unknown running strong within us because we don’t know what the danger really is or how bad it could be. That’s instinctively horrifying to us. Lesser directors simply aren’t willing to be this patient.

Watkins also uses motion very effectively. Strangely, this is something you rarely see in the “creepy image” movies. I think the reason is that those directors focus on creating horrific single images for you to examine and they want you to think about that image, not the action of the scene. Watkins, by comparison, uses motion to show how Kipps is being surrounded. For example, you get to watch a ghost walking toward the house from a grave at one point; you are watching this from the second floor. Think about the horror of knowing that thing just entered the downstairs. Is it coming up the stairs? Has it blocked the exit? That is so much stronger than just seeing an image of the ghost somewhere in the house because it makes you feel that you are now trapped. Remember, when it just appears in the house, you invaded its turf, but seeing it enter the house means it’s hunting you. . . and it’s now between you and the door.

Another shot involves Kipps resting his eyes while he sits in a chair. As he does, we see a long hallway over his shoulder and we see a ghost start down the hallway toward him. . . and us. This is a great idea which builds terror with each passing second and it stuns me that you almost never see anyone do this on film. I don’t know why not. The one complaint I do have about that scene, however, is that Watkins changes the perspective very quickly from watching over Kipps’ shoulder to seeing from the ghost’s perspective. It was an effective scene, but it would have been so much more effective if you had been left to watch helplessly as the thing approached you.

Beyond the creeps, the other thing Watkins does is to keep the film from feeling like a giant cliché. I’ve said before that there’s nothing wrong with clichés if they are handled right. Clichés give us comfort. They are like sign posts of the familiar and they only become a problem if a film merely repeats the cliché as if this is somehow worthwhile. But so long as something new or different is done at critical moments, then the cliché works fine. That’s the case here.

For example, one of the oldest clichés in the book is the outsider who comes to the small village and is accused of bringing evil with them. This film starts that way as well with the villagers shunning Kipps as they believe he has restarted the wave of suicides. The cliché tells us that they will attack him at the worst possible time and thereby ironically help the ghost. Only they don’t. And when they don’t, it feels refreshing because you feel like the director isn’t just going to feed you clichés. The film is full of moments like this, where the cliché doesn’t happen.

Ok, let me add to the ** spoiler alert ** ... I’m going to discuss the ending now. Skip to the conclusion if you haven’t seen the film.

One of the biggest clichés in these films is that when you have a woman ghost, it’s because something happened to her child(ren). And once you reunite the ghost with the body of her missing child, everything ends happily. Of course, that’s after the titanic struggle where the hero gets knocked around by the ghost until the ghost sees the dead body and then rainbows appear. This film starts down that road, but it doesn’t turn out that way. In fact, one of the most refreshing aspects of this film is that it doesn’t devolve into a typical Hollywood CGI-extravaganza at the end. To the contrary, it keeps the feel of the film up to that point, with a low-key ending.

Moreover, I really liked the ambiguity at the very end of the film. My first thought on the ending was that Kipps had failed to solve the problem with Jennet. After all, getting killed along with your son sounds like a loss no matter how you score it. But then I began to wonder. Maybe he actually succeeded. It strikes me that the ending was meant to be positive because you see the family reunited. So either Jennet took her revenge but her revenge was ineffective because she inadvertently made him happy. . . or maybe this was Jennet’s way to reward Kipps? We know that Kipps’ life was meaningless without his wife, so maybe Jennet thought she would reward him by reuniting the family? Keep in mind that Jennet is a bit mental, so this might make more sense to her. Granted, that’s kind of rough on Kipps’ son, but I can’t say that he seems all that unhappy. So I’m left to wonder what the ending really means, but I suspect it means he did solve the problem. In any event, finding that kind of interesting intellectual twist at the end a movie that was much better than I expected, was quite a pleasant surprise.

Conclusion

All in all, this was an excellent film. It looked like it would be a poor film based on a cliché with bad acting and a high chance of a poor director, but it really didn’t turn out that way at all. I enjoyed this thoroughly. It gave me something to think about. It creeped me out at times. And I never once felt bored or disinterested. Is it the best horror film ever? No. But it is one of the best in a good long while.