The pleasures of the period ghost story The Woman in Black are something like the creepy shiver of delight you get from Edward Gorey’s illustrated poem The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which describes horrific deaths suffered by innocents of yore (“I is for Ida who drowned in a lake/J is for James who took lye by mistake”), accompanied by heavily crosshatched drawings of wan moppets wearing black cotton stockings and mournful expressions. Terrible things happen in The Woman in Black: Children are snatched from their parents by the Grim Reaper, nurseries become insane asylums and numerous unseen nasties go bump in the night. But director James Watkins has just the right touch with the polishing cloth: The picture has the soft, dark gleam of a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry, and its gloom is always offered with a wink.
Daniel Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, an unhappy widowed lawyer who leaves his young son behind in London for a week to head out to the country, where he needs to wrap up the paperwork on an estate whose owner has recently died. His son will join him at the end of the week for a little holiday, though it quickly becomes apparent that that’s not such a good idea. En route by train to the village, Arthur meets one of the townspeople, Mr. Daily (Ciarán Hinds, whose half-jovial, half-haunted face was clearly invented by God to appear in just these sorts of ghost stories). Daily offers, a bit cautiously, to be of assistance. He also cautions Arthur that he’ll never find a local buyer for the house, and you can bet that termites or your garden-variety black mold aren’t the problem.
In that town, Arthur finds a world of grief: Daily, it turns out, lost his own child…
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