What we get here is a film that, despite its watery climax, paddles in the shallows, content to give us more easy Woman thrills, without really examining the horror of what makes us human.Jump forward ten years later to another Halloween and the insane asylum that Chris Vale now calls home. And newcomer Phoebe Fox’s fine, tremulous performance suggests an actress who could dive into the depths of unfiltered grief. Earlier this year The Babadook showed how to transform a haunted house into something fresh and genuinely disturbing. But inevitably, back to the house and its black widow we go, and it’s business as usual. The best scenes here use these specifics: a fake airplane landing field location a gruesome use for a gas mask the repressed guilt of survivors. A tale set in WWII, a time where blackouts were mandatory, where death was ever-present and minds could snap at any time under the psychic strain, is fertile ground for horror. It’s a shame because, if you get rid of the actual Woman in Black, there’s some promising material here. There’s only so many renovations one can do. But the story, indeed the entire franchise has already been mortgaged to a property we’ve already seen condemned. One can feel him straining to keep things fresh, the camera constantly creeping in and around the old dark house. Director Tom Harper (The Scouting Book for Boys, TV series Peaky Blinders) is one of the more promising young British helmers around, but it’s as if he knows that we already know the mysteries in store. Tell us something we don’t know, already. It’s a little like making a Jason Vorhees sequel called Friday 13th: Maniac with a Hockey Mask and Machete. Even the Angel of Death subtitle feels redundant. And just once, it would be refreshing to see a ghost story where the door hinges were well oiled, the pipe work didn’t wheeze like an asthmatic and every kid’s plaything didn’t resemble a dog’s chew toy. Those irritating LOUDJUMPSCARES, a feature of almost every modern horror flick generally having little to do with the actual plot, turn up on schedule every 10 minutes. Jeremy Irvine as Harry and Phoebe Fox as Eve in Woman in Black: Angel of Death. It’s prose, all right, but there’s no poetry. He dutifully includes them but then proceeds – Eve’s tortured visions aside – to have characters tell each other their painful secrets, more than show them. Screenwriter Jon Croker knows enough to ensure that both protagonists, Eve and Harry, need some unresolved past traumas that tie into the main storyline. For all the film’s admirable production qualities – George Steel’s images give the ever-present mist a creepy tactile quality and Jacqueline Abrahams’ production design on the dilapidated Eel Marsh House makes the Bates Motel look like the Beverly Wilshire – there’s something overly studied and box-ticked at play here. Eve, with the help of dashing and locally stationed RAF pilot Harry Burnstow (Jeremy Irvine), must fight back against their implacable ghostly foe. It’s Eve who tries to connect with vulnerable young orphan Edward, and who first gets suspicious when Edward starts to exhibit trance-like behaviour and when grisly things start happening to the other children. Hogg (Helen McCrory) and the younger, kinder Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox). At Eel Marsh House, you don’t need the German Luftwaffe to be in danger from things that go bump in the night. Unfortunately the vengeful spirit of Jennet Humfrye, the wronged suicide whose own son died, is still lurking about. Instead we open during the Blitz, 1941, as a bunch of young children leave bombed-out London town for the, heh-heh-heh, safety of the countryside. We don’t get another Victorian gothic drama, then, with star Daniel Radcliffe replaced by another Hogwarts classmate.
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