
CBS Films
Daniel Radcliffe as "Scary" Potter
Ignoring the warning of locals (natch), Kipps snakes his way down a meandering causeway to Drablow's decrepit estate, an archetypal haunted house cut off from the mainland by the nocturnal high tide. Filmed on the 380-acre Osea Island in Essex, the evocative locale is, unfortunately, far more dynamic than its on-screen inhabitants.
After arriving, Kipps' professional duties quickly take a backseat to wading into the mysterious death of a young boy years earlier. “Don't go chasing shadows, Arthur,” warns Sam Dailey (Ciarán Hinds), a cynical local landowner. Of course, movies of this sort subsist off such folly, so Kipps not only chooses to stay overnight at the haunted mansion (cueing audience groans and guffaws), but he follows every sounds and opens every locked door, most notably the ghostly presence of the titular femme. There's surprisingly little blood; the lone sight of crimson, gushing from the mouth of a doomed girl, stands out against a palette that's as hoary as the horror precepts at play.
Radcliffe does well playing Scary Potter but is given little else to do—fans will have to make do seeing him again do battle with a pale-faced villain, visiting an ethereal rail station in the process. Hinds headlines a game supporting cast that includes Janet McTeer (Oscar-nominated for Albert Nobbs and Tumbleweeds) as Dailey's grief-crazed wife. Their presence marks the only instances the film achieves anything approaching character complexity.
That said, Watkins crafts some striking visuals, and audiences pining for the visceral stimuli of an old-fashioned ghost story will occasionally jump out of their seats, at least until fifth or sixth time an empty rocking chair totters on its own or the woman-in-black's ashen visage appears in a window pane or down a long corridor. Capped by a cloying climax, The Woman in Black quickly runs out of frights … and clichés.