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 firm
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 one of
the creepiest rooms 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.