The Woman in Black: Horror Plot Holes

The Woman in Black is the movie where Harry Potter gets to prove that he’s all grown up. And Daniel Radcliffe leaves nothing to chance about how far removed he is from the boy wizard, going as far as he can into the R-rated adult world by taking on the role of Arthur Kipps, a lawyer, but most importantly, a father. Yes, of the many leaps of faith that the movie requires you to buy into, The Woman in Black will ask you to believe that Radcliffe has a four-year-old son. Teen parent? Scary, indeed.

Horror releases in February rarely end up being classics; yet, The Woman in Black avoids a typical fate of being utterly unbearable genre crap. It offers plenty of eerie landscapes, jump scares, doors opening on their own, otherworldly noises coming from (previously) locked doors, and creepy apparitions appearing out of nowhere (with excessively loud sound track screams and music cues just in case you missed the ghostly face) to send chills down your spine. Yet, something keeps it from being truly memorable.

The mark of a good horror flick is one that leaves you looking over your shoulder or wanting to keep a light on at night long after you’ve finished seeing the movie. And after catching the Saturday night showing, I promptly went home and slept like a baby. So, no matter how high my blood pressure may have gotten while seated in the dark theater, Radcliffe’s supernatural shenanigans stopped being effective the minute I validated my parking.

But it’s not Radcliffe’s fault. He still looks young – because he is – despite the permanent three-weeks shadow, yet he handles the emotional weight of portraying a recently widowed, single father rather well. While I never quite believed him to be a dad, thankfully the film separates him from his son almost instantly, so we can instead focus on how he’s forlorn over his wife’s death. Young or old, heartbreak affects us all and Radcliffe shows some true pain behind his blue eyes.

What The Woman in Black lacks are solid stakes. When the main character, stuck in a haunted house by an angry woman wearing early-1900s black widow garb, doesn’t really need to be there at all, it makes us wonder why we’re even there, either. Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a London lawyer who has been aloof since his wife died giving birth to their son. He gets a final chance with his law firm by managing the estate of a recently deceased recluse out in rural England. But as we learn about this task, Kipps’ boss is literally holding the last will in his hands. Apparently, though, there are stacks of paperwork in the old mansion that need to be gone through in order to properly sell the home? Not sure what else could be necessary when you have the legal will right there, but hey, this is a cheap horror flick, so I’ll bite. That is, until Kipps gets to the deserted mansion and, instead of gathering all of the paperwork and taking it back to London with him, which seems like the logical thing to do, he voluntarily stays overnight, by himself, where he ends up in a weird episode of John Grisham’s Ghost Hunters International, minus any and all legal activities.

I’ve seen plenty of horror flicks, enough to know that there will always be those moments when the audience goes “Why don’t you just leave!?” But a good one will somehow tie the main characters to the venue, usually with the simple act of a family having spent a few hundred thousand on a new house, so turning around and re-selling it immediately isn’t exactly the simplest task. I suppose I should give The Woman in Black credit for attempting to buck that story trend that has been travelled way too many times already. But there’s a reason that most haunted house stories go that route: it works. Without even a clichéd reason for Kipps to stick around, every single time – and it’s easily in the dozens – that he slowly climbs those stairs to check out the latest eerie sound coming from the second floor, we can’t help but roll our eyes and think: “Just get out of there!” It’s not his house. It’s not his town. And the only thing that he’s found amidst the mountains of loose sheets of paper were countless birthday cards, which I don’t believe hold much weight in probate court, but I could be wrong. So, why stick around?

To combat this obvious flaw, screenwriter Jane Goldman (adapting from a Susan Hill novel) gives us not just a large, haunted mansion but places that mansion out in a muddy marshland, separated from the mainland by a single-track dirt road that finds itself conveniently covered by the rising tide twice a day. So, once Kipps quarantines himself on the estate to do his legal investigation, he’s stuck there by default for hours – which is plenty of time for the woman in black to scare the living crap out of him by bringing the nursery to disembodied life. While there are plenty of places throughout the estate – both inside and out in the yard, which is strangely filled with gravestones – where ghosts appear, our main poltergeist specifically loves the nursery. (Clearly this woman – and her sister – had issues before she died since this room is cluttered with the creepiest “toys” ever. I know they didn’t have TV yet, but, I mean, c’mon. I’m pretty sure the mask from Saw was in there next to the kid’s bed.) I give it up to director James Watkins for coming up with new ways to shoot the exact same door and hallway at least twenty different times without resorting to extremely canted angles or other gimmicks. Not that it didn’t become laughable at points when the biggest dread-inducing moment was seeing a closed door. In the end, Kipps just didn’t have enough to do nor enough truly keeping him in the house, which made those frequent trips upstairs boring.

The sugar making that pill go down, though, is that The Woman in Black is set in turn-of-the-century England, a welcomed change of venue from recent modern-day ghost flicks, which helped to sell the notion that Radcliffe was married and producing offspring at the ripe old age of 18. Excellent costumes and moody set design created dank atmospheres, aided by morose performances from all supporting actors, notably the one and only Ciarán Hinds. Although I couldn’t help but wish I were instead watching Hinds’ own recent ghost flick, The Eclipse, which was superb despite being seen by hardly anyone.

When all is said and done, The Woman in Black delivers solid atmosphere, strong performances from Radcliffe and Hinds, and enough eerie scares to satisfy the casual horror film fan looking for a mild fright. But the weak stakes, repetitive structure, and lackluster ending leave it wanting. If nothing else, though, Radcliffe proves that he has more to offer cinema than just defeating He Who Shall Not Be Named.