Let me preface this by saying that The Woman in Black, despite whatever justified reservations you may have about Daniel Radcliffe, is a very good film and you should definitely see it if you get the chance. Special mention has to go out to the set design: Eel Marsh House looks like Satis House after the apocalypse, and the whole film deserves some kind of special award for services to ludicrously creepy children's toys. It makes me happier than I can adequately say to see a horror film which knows that true horror has its roots in tension, suspense and mind games, not blood, gore and titties.
But.
I can't help but think there are, all the same, a lot of areas where it went wrong, and it's been a while since I wrote a negative review, so here goes. I'm going to try and keep spoilers to a minimum, but if it's on your To See list, I'd advise coming back and reading this afterwards.
First and foremost, while you will doubtless be on the edge of, and quite possibly hunched into, your seat for pretty much the entirety of the film, I can't shake the feeling that it just isn't scary enough. Part of this is probably due to knowing more or less what was going to happen, having read the book and seen the play; but that doesn't change the fact that the play is genuinely piss-your-pants terrifying while the film is merely quite scary.
The main part of the problem is a simple one: they show you the titular Woman far too much. She is at her scariest when you only just glimpse her, maybe for only a fraction of a second: the momentary flash of her face seen in a zoetrope, or when she's off to the side of the shot and out of focus. But the filmmakers insist on frequently putting her right in the middle of the frame, often for several seconds at a time, which does nothing but dilute the impact she has. There are a couple of moments towards the end when she runs straight at the camera screaming like a banshee, and yes, it's quite unnerving, but the fright is over as soon as she's off the screen again. In the play, you barely see her, but you feel her presence the whole time and are constantly frightened that she might appear. It's the first rule of horror filmmaking: the less you see of something, the more frightening it is. Our minds will always frighten us more effectively than a film can. This is doubly frustrating because I'm informed that they filmed it in extra-widescreen so they could experiment with putting things right on the edge of your field of view, but they don't take advantage of it nearly enough.
A corollary to this is probably more of a personal problem, I admit, but I wish they hadn't kept showing you the ghosts of the dead children. It's possibly because I love the play's ridiculously minimalist setup (a stage, two men, a box, and the Woman), but I felt like they detracted from the threat of the Woman herself. Every J-horror film made in the last decade has shown us that, yes, dead children are scary, and the trope feels overplayed and unnecessary. Like the Woman, we see far too much of them, and I can't help but feel like it was an just an opportunity to get what are essentially zombies into the film, as if we hadn't already seen enough of them in every book, film, game and comic produced in the last five years. They also cause serious problems with the ending, but I'll get to that in a minute.
*ENDING SPOILERS - DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE FILM*
The ending, it has to be said, is crap. Utter trash. The ending of the play is incredibly depressing and results in you leaving the theatre absolutely terrified, where the ending here is an attempt to give some kind of redemption to Arthur Kipps. Quite apart from the syrupyness of it all, it doesn't make sense in the context of the story. In brief: the Woman makes his son walk in front of a train, Kipps runs to him, they both die. In itself, not bad. Would've been better if Kipps had survived a broken, hollow shell of a man, but still. But then, we see a sequence of Kipps and his son being reunited with his wife in what is presumably Heaven.
It doesn't work. Every indication so far has been that Heaven doesn't exist. The presence of the ghosts of the children killed by the Woman all but outright states that her victims are cursed to be restless for eternity and never find peace. Ciaran Hinds' character tells us the reason he doesn't believe in the Woman is because he wants to believe his son is in Heaven; she does exist, hence her victims cannot go to Heaven. Shortly before Kipps and his son are run over by the train, we hear the woman whisper "never forgive".
Apparently, her final revenge is to grant a tortured soul eternal peace with his beloved wife.
*END OF SPOILERS*
Let me conclude by reiterating my first point: The Woman in Black is a very good film. I'm still not entirely convinced about Daniel Radcliffe, but this was a step in the right direction for him; and Ciaran Hinds is as good in this as he ever is, even if I want to shout "Hail Caesar!" every time he appears on screen. All the same, it could so easily have been so much better. Here's hoping Hammer's next effort doesn't make the mistakes this one made.
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