THE WOMAN IN BLACK directed by James Watkins, written by Jane Goldman from the novel by Susan Hill, with Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds and Janet McTeer. An Alliance Films release. 95 minutes. Opens Friday (February 3). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN
British director James Watkins takes an accomplished step up from his breathless chase picture, Eden Lake, with The Woman In Black, an elegant ghost story that packs some thoughtful character work in between its jump scares.
Set a century ago, it stars Daniel Radcliffe as the despondent Arthur Kipps, a widowed estate lawyer dispatched from London to a remote coastal town to sort out a deceased client’s affairs. The paperwork is the least of his problems once he twigs to the legend of a vengeful spirit that’s preying on the town’s children.
Though Watkins deploys a few strategic crashes and thuds to keep the attention-deficit crowd from drifting off, his film has a stateliness and gravity that recall grand ghost stories of decades past like The Haunting and The Innocents.
And in his first role after wrapping the Harry Potter series, Radcliffe is entirely credible as a widower with a small child – hey, people married young 100 years ago – and proves quite able to hold the screen in a 20-minute set piece played entirely without dialogue.
