rating: ★★★★

Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) begins to suspect the old mansion isn’t quite what it seems.

Get all of those Harry Potter jokes out of your system right now becausee whether or not you associate Daniel Radcliffe with the teenage wizard does not matter with regards to his newest film. The Woman in Black will probably scare those fond memories of Hogwarts right out of all you Muggles.

Directed by James Watkins (Eden Lake) The Woman in Black is set in the early 1900s and follows a young widowed lawyer, Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe), whose wife died during childbirth and is raising a four-year-old son alone while suffering from depression. He’s not performing well in his job and seemingly just drifts by.

One day, his firm sends him to a remote village in order to sort out some paperwork for the sale of an old mansion. The mansion’s tenants recently died, and the straightforward job is a chance for Kipps to prove he isn’t a useless lawyer.

Of course, things in the town and the old mansion are a little strange — to put it lightly.

Everyone in town is on edge and melancholic. The town is hostile to Kipps, although he does manage to become friends with a wealthy local, Sam Daily (Ciarán Hinds). Kipps begins to discover that the more he tries to sort out the affairs of the mansion, the more the townspeople want him to leave and the deeper he finds himself involved in a gruesome superstition involving the town’s children.

The Woman in Black delivers some impeccable pacing that is not often seen in modern horror films. In many ways, it is a throwback to what is truly scary in horror films, taking a minimalist approach to what is actually scaring Kipps. The movie is relentless, barely letting you catch your breath between scares. It keeps the intensity at such a high rate that there were moments when I thought I would pass out. The sheer intensity is what really drives the film and moves it at such a brisk pace.

Though Radcliffe seems a bit young for the role, he does a good job of playing to the gloominess of his character.

The film’s visuals also help with capturing the gloomy atmosphere of the town and the characters. Everything in the town is painted with an overwhelming grey colour palette, where even the most innocent sight seems dark and depressing. The editing is also impressive, cutting away at all the right moments in order to make the situations increasingly unsettling.

Watkins has a couple horror films under his directorial belt now and it is easy to see that he knows exactly how to make an audience uncomfortable. The film has jump-scares, as is to be expected, but it is the way that Watkins rolls out these scares that makes them truly frightening. It all comes down to timing and he has an impeccable sense of it, making you wait past the obvious moment for the scare. He fills you with dread and anxiety, never knowing when that scare is going to come. When it finally does come, you’ll find the rapid beating of your heart feels like it could burst out of your chest.

The film’s climax, while definitely terrifying, maybe reveals just a bit too much, shying away from the more minimalistic approach of the rest of the film. It is really hard to complain though since it still had me squirming in my seat just the same.

The Woman in Black is a refreshing film for mainstream horror fans, delivering something that is actually scary for a change.

—
Photo:Supplied