The Woman in Black — A Retrospective0

Written by Sangitha Raman

The genre of this movie is drama, hor­ror and thriller and it comes with a rat­ing of PG-13. This movie caught me by sur­prise because I was clue­less that it was a hor­ror movie until it started! Based on the looks of the movie poster I ini­tially got the idea that it was just another thriller movie. Though the movie was not espe­cially scary there were some scenes that kept me on the edge of my seat.

Daniel Radcliffe has grown out of his highly famed “Harry Potter” char­ac­ter and plays the lead role as a young lawyer and a matured father. He trav­els to a remote vil­lage where he dis­cov­ers the venge­ful ghost of a scorned woman is ter­ror­iz­ing the locals. Will he be able to solve the mys­tery and stop the woman in black? You will have to watch the movie to find out for yourself.

But over­all I felt this movie had dif­fer­ent style than the usual “hor­ror” movies, which often gets lost in all the blood and gore. I am glad that finally there is a movie with a dif­fer­ent kind angle to hor­ror. But the movie was slightly dis­ap­point­ing as I expected more scenes to scare the hell out of the audi­ence but the peak hor­ror scenes always died off with no excite­ment. Despite all that jus­tice was made to the old-fashioned 1907 set­ting the movie adapted right from the haunted man­sion to the cast’s wardrobe choices. The end­ing has to be my per­sonal favorite; it had a spe­cial twist touch to the movie.

Directed by James Watkins; writ­ten by Jane Goldman, based on the novel by Susan Hill; direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy, Tim Maurice-Jones; edited by Jon Harris; music by Marco Beltrami; pro­duc­tion design by Kave Quinn; cos­tumes by Keith Madden; pro­duced by Richard Jackson, Simon Oakes and Brian Oliver; released by CBS Films.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe (Arthur Kipps), Ciaran Hinds (Samuel Daily), Janet McTeer (Mrs. Daily), Shaun Dooley (Fisher) and Liz White (Jennet Humfrye).

Rating: 3/5