THE WOMAN IN BLACK

   The fury of a mother believing her son was stolen from her…later, left to die.  Her endless search for justice—or maybe endless vengeance… going way past an-eye-for-an-eye.

A young father dealing with the loss of his wife in childbirth.  He struggles to crawl out of the place he has escaped to…he knows his son needs him.   But the pain of feeling is nearly unbearable.   Now he is threatened with losing his job—his work record has been poor since her death. He knows he and his boy stand on the edge of disaster.The last thing the young man needs is to enter this woman’s world—yet he has no choice, if he wants to save his
job.  The house where this woman hanged herself needs to be
sold, and his law firm demands he settle the paperwork. “This is your final warning,” is how the head of the fir
puts it.

The man, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe, veteran of the Harry Potter series) comes to a town haunted by unending tragedy.  All Arthur wants is to take care of legal business but he is unwelcome.   He cannot understand the reasons all at once.  Everyone in town wants him to gather the papers he needs—and get out—now.

But Arthur can’t do what is necessary without staying a while and investigating a house no one wants any part of.  Everyone in town fears that the vengeful woman’s spirit haunts this house.  If her spirit is disturbed in any way, the town will suffer more tragedy; they already have suffered deeply.

Arthur needs to spend time there, with only a small dog for company.  Some of these stretches will feel like your standard generic haunted-house movie: the mysterious noises, the ghostly figures emerging in silence, the white faces of dead children standing motionless in the rain, the creepy wind-up toys banging cymbals or shakingtheir tambourines at the most suspenseful moments.

Arthur–no choice but to deal with the house and its legacy

Yet Arthur’s character takes this story in some new directions.  His personal tragedy (the death of his beautiful young wife) gives him courage.  Whatever spirits and ghosts he runs into, they can’t do much more to him than life already has.  The house hasn’t got much that can really scare him—he has a job to do, and he is already numb.  You don’t expect him to run screaming out of this house unless it’s something really serious.

Personal tragedy has left him with little else to fear

The irony is that people in town are exactly right—any time the lady has a reason to appear, children will die. And anyone who sees her (Arthur the most likely)—spreads death like a contagious disease.  Her presence at the house is unmistakable—Arthur sees her again and again.  Just glimpses, but enough.  The first child Arthur sees face to face in town dies that day; she drinks lye before anyone has a chance to save her.

Everyone is positive this girl won’t be the last to die—Arthur has seen the woman,and this makes him a sure messenger of death.

Three more children, swept up in Jennet’s spell

You learn that the vengeful woman in black, Jennet, lost her son to her sister, Alice Drablow.  Her son Nathaniel never got the sweet, loving cards Jennet sent him—Alice hid them.  Alice even got legal papers signed to keep Jennet from visiting.  Later on, Jennet came to believe that Alice left Nathaniel to die when their coach sank into mud on the causeway between the house and the mainland.

You watch the movie, and wait to see who in town conspired with Alice the most.  On whom the vengeance needed to strike the hardest.  And ironically the answer is no one—there are no more dirty secrets.  At least none that the movie tells you.  The
Woman in Black’s plot actually reminds me less of an English ghost story than those of recent Japanese horror movies
such as The Grudge or The Ring—where an avenging spirit will hurt anyone it comes across, guilty or innocent.  All it wants to do is lash out—at everyone and anyone.

Arthur doesn’t understand all of this yet.  He knows that Jennet’s spirit has found no rest…and how the deaths of children in town took place.  All of them appeared to be under a deep spell.  They suddenly stopped whatever they were doing, and walked out of windows, or walked into the sea.  The second girl Arthur saw dies by setting herself on fire. What he does believe in is justice, and
bringing the deaths to an end.

He is searching for a way to make everything right.  His wife’s death could have affected him in radically different ways.  He could have become uncaring…believing the Universe is uncaring; why should he care about anyone.

Or his pain could have made him determined to do the best he can, whenever he can, even when he is tempted to slide back into not caring, to escape his own pain.  Watch him put a tiny bird back into its nest while he explores the creepiest room in the house.   Then a crow screams, making him jump.  It lands on a bed.  But Arthur means to do the right thing and let it escape—and he makes sure he does.

Eventually he decides he must re-unite the woman’s spirit with the body of her dead son…even though he must risk his life pulling the child’s body free from the thick black mud surrounding the causeway.  Many of us who have experienced sorrow will later make a similar decision–we need to do the right thing.

The film-makers tried to find a middle ground between the quiet, subtle, almost mannered approach of The Innocents, or The Others, and the loud, slam-shocks and close-ups of Drag Me to Hell or Se7en.
The shocks do tend to be loud in volume, but with hardly any blood, let alone body parts getting chopped off.  Their goal
was not gore. But they did not want a stuffy period piece either.
This is no Masterpiece Theater.

One of the few movies I remember close to this one was the much underrated 1979 film The Changeling, with George C. Scott.  Like
Arthur, John Russell (Scott’s character) is grieving family deaths, and like Arthur, he has no intentions of confronting any ghosts.  But his exploring an old house frees a spirit looking for justice over a past wrong.

That story was probably a more traditional one—revenge is visited on the guilty—and only on the guilty. Too many of the concrete facts are left out in The Woman in Black. You are never told for sure, but it appears that Jennet never had the chance to revenge herself on her sister.  In some way, Alice was able to escape Jennet’s reach, her hatred.

Jennet’s spirit became the proverbial bottomless pit—no amount of vengeance could ever satisfy her.

Many say there are no new stories to tell…and they have some convincing arguments.  But there are not many stories like this one; a spirit of pure hatred, face to face with a character who has almost gone past fear.  An individual struggling to find meaning in the death of someone they loved deeply. You don’t get a twist ending, at least not the kind you have grown to expect the last twenty years or so.  Instead, this story brings you to a conclusion that clearly shows you what each individual carries with them.  Many American Buddhists are taught some variation on the following: Don’t look at the notion of karma as simply, We all get what we deserve.  There’s a lot more to it.  You can look at
the ending as plain and simple…or something more subtle, that you need to think more about.  I really don’t want to give anything more away, to risk ruining it.  See it, judge for yourself.