WOMAN IN BLACK, THE

The Woman In Black obeys all of the conventions of a gothic ghost story and yet it still manages to present an unnerving and intriguing mystery. In the early 1900s Daniel Radcliffe plays a poor widower who is sent by his law firm to a remote township to organise the paperwork of a diseased woman. He receives a hostile welcome from locals and is told to leave. Finding himself isolated by tide on the dead woman's estate which is located on the other side of a marsh, he begins to see startling apparitions and a mysterious woman in black. The locals tell him that whenever the woman is seen, children die. The most effective ghost stories usually involve dead children and this film plays to that strength. The suspense is nicely done with an eerie score, albeit overly dramatic at times, and the scattered moments of revelation are startling and brief. The movie takes the familiar formula and does all of the right things. Daniel Radcliffe is not a great actor but this is the precise type of movie he needs to be making... there is little dialogue and most of his on-screen time is spent wandering the halls of an abandoned mansion. The mystery is good and when revealed, I found it satisfying. The film is based on a popular novel which has already been adapted for television and became a long-running play on the West End. Watching it I kept thinking that this would have served well as an instalment of the Tales From The Crypt film franchise... but the film is, however, a HAMMER film... ah-huh! It's great to see Hammer films back on the scene. They also recently made The Resident and Let Me In. I can't wait for more. With horror movies having gone through another violent and graphic era its a welcome change to see something classic like this.

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