#246: The Woman in Black: Angel of Death
Better than the one with Daniel Radcliffe but that’s not saying much
This review was originally posted to Twitter on April 18, 2020.
Initial release: December 30, 2014
Director: Tom Harper
Sequels to bad movies aren’t supposed to be good. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) for the 2012 Daniel Radcliffe vehicle The Woman in Black, a remake of an earlier film from 1989, the Blitz-themed sequel — creatively titled The Woman in Black: Angel of Death — isn’t good either. But it’s better, at least?
Part of this improvement is that there’s no big names in this film desperately trying to avoid being typecast (or, conversely, a resigned victim of said typecasting.) No Daniel Radcliffes in this film, though Adrian Rawlins, who starred in the ’89 version, appears as a minor character. Instead, we get a much larger cast of mostly children, their minders and an RAF pilot. It’s 1941, the Germans are still bombing England, and a gaggle of kids have been evacuated from London with a pair of teachers to an isolated, abandoned manor out in the marshes.
The manor has sat empty for 30 years; the nearby village of Crythin Gifford (please drive carefully) is a ghost town as well, with only a single mad, blind resident. The manor is decrepit, barely habitable and on a barely-accessible island in the midst of a sea of mud; unfortunately there’s no other option for the evacuees, it’s the only place big enough that’s still standing. Eve, the younger, subordinate teacher, played by theater circuit regular Phoebe Fox, soon becomes convinced that there’s something inherently wrong with the place. Aside from the occasional glimpses of a sinister figure in black watching her, there’s just an overall unsettling vibe — to say nothing of her nightmares.
Keeping her distracted is her work as a teacher, as well as her trying to reach Edward, a recently orphaned boy who hasn’t said a word since his parents died in a Luftwaffe bombing the night before he was due to leave. Another distraction is the handsome, blond RAF bomber pilot, of course — because everyone loves a man in uniform. When one of the children somehow manages to leave the house through a mysteriously unlocked front door and seemingly dies in an accident with some barbed wire on the muddy edge of the island, Eve becomes convinced that someone has been watching the group…
I’ll admit, after my mild dislike for the previous movie, I came in fully expecting to hate this one. And there’s a lot about it that I still dislike — the editing, the jumpscares, the constant creepy faces, it’s all just some of the most masturbatory late-00s horror movie tripe. On the other hand, there’s something more substantial here than just Daniel Radcliffe running around getting spooked by a ghost. Eve may be a classic gothic horror heroine, but she offsets that with a murky past of her own that serves as the core of the ghost’s motivation.
Towards the end of the film it’s revealed that when Eve was younger, she gave birth to a child out of wedlock, and the child was taken from her as she lay in the hospital bed. she searched for him for years but eventually gave up, a fact that angers the local ghost to no end. If you never saw the 2012 film the movie kindly fills in the details for you: Alice, the former owner of the house was raising her nephew like her own son as her sister Jennet was deemed unfit; Jennet, in turn, blamed Alice for her son’s death, and haunts the house to this day. To give the film credit, this info isn’t dumped on you at the beginning; it’s generally assumed that the audience remembers the details of the previous film (I didn’t), but cleverly integrates the recap into the story as the characters uncover the house’s history on their own.
The finale is almost a little spectacular, going into some Silent Hill territory as Eve is confronted with her nightmares about losing her child, as well as capitalizing on clever foreshadowing with a hole in the ceiling under the fateful nursery where Jennet hung herself.
Gothic horror is a well-worn genre that has little left to offer. The Woman in Black: Angel of Death brings nothing new besides a worse title, but with a more subtle hand with its presentation it could have been a fairly respectable film in its own right.
